Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VI, pp. 235-236
Context: Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
John Maynard Keynes: Trending quotes (page 2)
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Referring to economics and the Great Depression
Essays in Persuasion (1931), The Great Slump of 1930 (1930)
Context: This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life … and will soon learn to afford a standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians”
Address to the Royal Society Club (1942), as quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1977) by Alan L. MacKay, p. 140
Essays In Biography (1933), Newton, the Man
Context: Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10 000 years ago.
as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1256603608595872&url=www.geocities.com/monedem/keyn.html
Essays in Persuasion (1931), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Context: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
“But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”
Source: A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), Ch. 3, p. 80
Context: But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.
"Overseas Financial Policy in Stage III" (unpublished memo distributed to the British Cabinet on 15 May 1945, in Collected Writings volume 24, p. 258).
If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
Variant reported in Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 17, 1947
If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
As quoted in The Economist (13 February 1982), p. 11
“Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the ignorant by the incompetent.”
From hearer's memory in Jewish Frontier, vol. 29 http://books.google.com/books?id=NmYeAAAAMAAJ&q=keynes+%22inculcation+of+the+incomprehensible+into+the+ignorant+by+the+incompetent%22&dq=keynes+%22inculcation+of+the+incomprehensible+into+the+ignorant+by+the+incompetent (1962).
Alternate version: Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
As quoted in Infinite Riches: Gems from a Lifetime of Reading (1979) by Leo Calvin Rosten, p. 165
Attributed
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”
National self-sufficiency http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/national.1933.html, New Statesman and Nation (15 July 1933)
Variant: Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
As quoted in When Genius Failed (2000) by Roger Lowenstein, p. 123; actually "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." from A. Gary Shilling, Forbes (1993) v. 151, iss. 4, p. 236; and again A. Gary Shilling in Semi information services seminar transcript, January 23 - 26, 1983: Newport Beach Marriott Hotel, Newport Beach, California p. 384 "... and the markets usually do anticipate recoveries. They've anticipated twelve of the last eight, I think. Of course, you need to keep in mind that the stock market can remain irrational a lot longer than you can remain solvent."
Attributed
“Ideas shape the course of history.”
As quoted in The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival (1976) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 97
Attributed
“The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.”
As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1977) by Alan L. MacKay, p. 140
Attributed
Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Alfred Marshall, p. 188
"A Short View of Russia" (1925); Originally three essays for the Nation and Athenaeum, later published separately as A Short View of Russia (1925), then edited down for publication in Essays in Persuasion (1931)
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - John Maynard Keynes / Quotes / Essays in Persuasion (1931)
Essays in Persuasion (1931), A Short View of Russia (1925)
Essays in Persuasion (1931), Am I a Liberal? (1925)
Letter to Roy Harrod (4 July 1938), in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XIV (1971), p. 297