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“A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

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

“The best way to cure this mortal disease of individualism must be to provide that there shall never exist any confident expectation either that prices generally are going to fall or that they are going to rise; and also that there shall be no serious risk that a movement, if it does occur, will be a big one. If, unexpectedly and accidentally, a moderate movement were to occur, wealth, though it might be redistributed, would not be diminished thereby.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

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

“The general theory of economic equilibrium was strengthened and made effective as an organon of thought by two powerful subsidiary conceptions — the Margin and Substitution. The notion of the Margin was extended beyond [Utility]] to describe the equilibrium point in given conditions of any economic factor which can be regarded as capable of small variations about a given value, or in its functional relation to a given value.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Alfred Marshall, p. 223

“Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.”

John Maynard Keynes

On the Cambridge Apostles of Cambridge University, in Essays in Biography (1933) Ch. 39; also later used in My Early Beliefs, a memoir he read to the Bloomsbury Group's Memoir Club in 1943.

“It is a grand book worthy of one’s hopes of you. A most powerful piece of well organized analysis with high aesthetic qualities, though written more perhaps than you see yourself for the cognoscenti in the temple and not for those at the gate. Anyhow I prefer it for intellectual enjoyment to any recent attempts in this vein.”

John Maynard Keynes

Letter to Abba Lerner, 1942, On The Economics of Control

“Money is only important for what it will procure. Thus a change in the monetary unit, which is uniform in its operation and affects all transactions equally, has no consequences. If, by a change in the established standard of value, a man received and owned twice as much money as he did before in payment for all rights and for all efforts, and if he also paid out twice as much money for all acquisitions and for all satisfactions, he would be wholly unaffected.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

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

“Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion — how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Source: Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 3

“I don't really start until I get my proofs back from the printers. Then I can begin my serious writing.”

John Maynard Keynes

As quoted in The Guardian (8 June 1983). p. 82
Attributed

“The phrase laissez-faire is not to be found in the works of Adam Smith, of Ricardo, or of Malthus. Even the idea is not present in a dogmatic form in any of these authors. Adam Smith, of course, was a Free Trader and an opponent of many eighteenth-century restrictions on trade. But his attitude towards the Navigation Acts and the usury laws shows that he was not dogmatic. Even his famous passage about 'the invisible hand' reflects the philosophy which we associate with Paley rather than the economic dogma of laissez-faire.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Source: Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 2

“In order to calculate the size of the cake which will be left for civilian consumption, we have to estimate (1) the maximum current output that we are capable of organising from our resources of men and plant and materials, (2) how fast we can safely draw on our foreign reserves by importing more than we export, (3) how much of all this will be used up by our war effort.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 3 : Our Output Capacity and the National Income

“The appropriate time for the ultimate release of the deposits will have arrived at the onset of the first post-war slump.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 7 : The Release of Deferred Pay and a Capital Levy

“It is extraordinarily difficult to secure the right outcome for this resultant of many separate policies. It depends on weighing one advantage against another. There is hardly a conceivable decision within the range of the supply services which does not affect it.”

John Maynard Keynes

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

“The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter I, p. 3

“For each individual it is a great advantage to retain the rights over the fruits of his labour even though he must put off the enjoyment of them. His personal wealth is thus increased. For that is what wealth is,—command of the right to postponed consumption.”

John Maynard Keynes

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

“Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.””

John Maynard Keynes

Attributed by Sir George Schuster, Christianity and human relations in industry (1951), p. 109
Recent variant: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
As quoted in Moving Forward: Programme for a Participatory Economy (2000) by Michael Albert, p. 128
Attributed

“If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VII, Section 1, p. 268

“Nothing can be settled in isolation. Every use of our resources is at the expense of an alternative use.”

John Maynard Keynes

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

“He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

On Georges Clemenceau, in Chapter III, p. 32
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

“He was the nicest, and the only talented person I saw in all Berlin, except perhaps old Fuerstenberg … and Kurt Singer. And he was a Jew; and so was Fuerstenberg. And my dear Melchior is a Jew too. Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite. For the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind of Jews, the ones who are not imps but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains. I vote rather for the plump hausfraus and thick fingered Wandering Birds. But I am not sure that I wouldn’t even rather be mixed up with Lloyd George than with the German political Jews.”

John Maynard Keynes

Notes after a meeting with Albert Einstein in 1926, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 10, p. 383