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“During the lengthy process of production the business world is incurring outgoings in terms of money-paying out in money for wages and other expenses of production-in the expectation of recouping this outlay by disposing of the product for money at a later date. That is to say, the business world as a whole must always be in a position where it stands to gain by a rise of price and to lose by a fall of price. Whether it likes it or not, the technique of production under a regime of money-contract forces the business world always to carry a big speculative position; and if it is reluctant to carry this position, the productive process must be slackened.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), Social Consequences of Changes in The Value of Money (1923)

“The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter IV, Section I, p. 77

“There was an attraction at first that Mr Baldwin should not be clever. But when he forever sentimentalises about his own stupidity, the charm is broken.”

John Maynard Keynes

Skidelsky (1992:232) quoting Keynes Papers PS/6

“We will not have any more crashes in our time.”

John Maynard Keynes

Conversation with Felix Somary in 1927, reported in Felix Somary, The Raven of Zurich, London: C. Hurst, 1986 (1960), 146-7
Attributed

“For the Trade Unions such a scheme as this offers great and evident advantages compared with progressive inflation or with a wages tax. In spite of the demands of war, the workers would have secured the enjoyment, sooner or later, of a consumption fully commensurate with their increased effort; whilst family allowances and the cheap ration would actually improve, even during the war, the economic position of the poorer families. We should have succeeded in making the war an opportunity for a positive social improvement. How great a benefit in comparison with a futile attempt to evade a reasonable share of the burden of a just war, ending in a progressive inflation!”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 5 : A Plan for Deferred Pay, Family, Allowances and a Cheap Ration

“Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), F. P. Ramsey, p. 296
Originally published in The Economic Journal, March 1930. and The New Statesman and Nation, October 3, 1931

“The ignorance of even the best-informed investor about the more remote future is much greater than his knowledge, and he cannot but be influenced to a degree which would seem wildly disproportionate to anyone who really knew the future, and be forced to seek a clue mainly here to trends further ahead. But if this is true of the best-informed, the vast majority of those who are concerned with the buying and selling of securities know almost nothing whatever about what they are doing. They do not possess even the rudiments of what is required for a valid judgement, and are the prey of hopes and fears easily aroused by transient events and as easily dispelled.”

John Maynard Keynes book A Treatise on Money

A Treatise on Money, Volume II (1930), pp. 360–61

“If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

“Courage will be forthcoming if tile leaders of opinion in all parties will summon out of tile fatigue and confusion of war enough lucidity of mind to understand for themselves and to explain to tile public what is required; and then propose a plan conceived in a spirit of social justice, a plan which uses a time of general sacrifice, not as an excuse for postponing desirable reforms, but as an opportunity for moving further than we have moved hitherto towards reducing in equalities.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 1 : The Character of the Problem

“The general character of our solution must be, therefore, that it withdraws from expenditure a proportion of the increased earnings. This is the only way, apart from shortages of goods or higher prices, by which we can secure a balance between money to be spent and goods to be bought.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 2 : The Character of the Solution

“I have now reached a stage in the argument where I have to choose between being too definite or being too vague. If I set forth a concrete proposal in all its particulars, I expose myself to a hundred criticisms on points not essential to the principle of the plan. If I go further in the use of figures for illustration, I am involved more and more in guess-work; and I run the risk of getting the reader bogged in details which may be inaccurate and could certainly be amended without injury to the main fabric. Yet if I restrict myself to generalities, I do not give the reader enough to bite on; and am in fact shirking the issue, since the size, the order of magnitude, of the factors involved is not an irrelevant detail.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 5 : A Plan for Deferred Pay, Family, Allowances and a Cheap Ration

“His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen it through.”

John Maynard Keynes

On Isaac Newton
Essays In Biography (1933), Newton, the Man

“The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.”

John Maynard Keynes

First Annual Report of the Arts Council (1945-1946)

“The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter III, p. 33

“Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section III, p. 21

“I do not know which makes a man more conservative — to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Source: Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 1

“The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”

John Maynard Keynes

National self-sufficiency (1933) http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/national.1933.html Section 3, republished in Collected Writings Vol. 11 (1982).

“I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.”

John Maynard Keynes

Letter to Duncan Grant (15 December 1917)

“Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VI, p. 250

“The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics.”

John Maynard Keynes

"Francis Ysidro Edgeworth", p. 286; Originally published in The Economic Journal, March 1926

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Essays In Biography (1933), Francis Ysidro Edgeworth