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John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes , was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomics theory and a mixed economy based system called social capitalism. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, Social capitalism, social market economy and its various offshoots.

In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions.

Following the outbreak of World War II, the leading Western economies adopted Keynes's policy recommendations, and in the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946, almost all capitalist governments had done so. Keynes's influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists. He and other economists had disputed the ability of government to regulate the business cycle favourably with fiscal policy.

The advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the crisis by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.

When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it said that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.

✵ 5. June 1883 – 21. April 1946
John Maynard Keynes photo
John Maynard Keynes: 122   quotes 12   likes

John Maynard Keynes Quotes

“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

Law , Idea

“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

Men , War , Effort , Drawing

“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

War , Time

“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

Decision , Dependency

“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

Personality , Wealth

“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

Money , Bird , Personality

“If Mr. Lloyd George had no good qualities, no charms, no fascinations, he would not be dangerous. If he were not a syren, we need not fear the whirlpools.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Mr. Lloyd George: A Fragment, p. 35

Fear

“It is not easy for a free community to organise for war. We are not accustomed to listen to experts or prophets. Our strength lies in an ability to improvise. Yet an open mind to untried ideas is also necessary. No-one can say when the end will come. In the war services it is recognised that the best security for an early conclusion is a plan for long endurance.”

John Maynard Keynes

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

War , Communication , Idea

“Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Robert Malthus: The First of the Cambridge Economists, p. 148

Children

“There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Alfred Marshall, p. 253

“The nature of unemployment today is totally different from what it was a year ago. It is no longer caused by a deficiency of demand. There is no longer a potential surplus supply of the things we want. The transition to full employment is hindered by two obstacles. The first is due to the difficulty of shifting labour to the points where it is wanted. The second— and, for the time being, the chief—-obstacle is caused by the difficulties, other than the shortage of labour, in the way of existing demand becoming effective.”

John Maynard Keynes

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

Way , Nature , Time

“All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas — and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Trotsky On England, p. 91

Idea , Past

“In peace time, that is to say, the size of the cake depends on the amount of work done. But in war time the size of the cake is fixed. If we work harder, we can fight better. But we must not consume more.”

John Maynard Keynes

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

War , Peace , Time , Fight

“That she [France] has anything to fear from Germany in the future which we can foresee, except what she may herself provoke, is a delusion. When Germany has recovered her strength and pride, as in due time she will, many years must pass before she again casts her eyes Westwards. Germany's future now lies to the East, and it is in that direction her hopes and ambitions, when they revive, will certainly turn.”

John Maynard Keynes book A Revision of the Treaty

A Revision of the Treaty (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 186

Fear , Hope , Time , Future

“The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section III, p. 19

War , Wealth

“Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.”

John Maynard Keynes

As quoted in Isms (2006) by Gregory Bergman, p. 105
Attributed

Success

“The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter IV, p. 56

Life , Revenge , Strong , Future

“The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section III, p. 20

Religion

“You can't push on a string.”

John Maynard Keynes

Attributed by [Hal R., Varian, http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2003-06-04.html, Dealing with Deflation, The New York Times, June 5, 2003, 2007-01-11]
Attributed

“This state of affairs is not an inevitable consequence of a decreased capacity to produce wealth. I see no reason why, with good management, real wages need be reduced on the average. It is the consequence of a misguided monetary policy.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill (1925)

Wealth

“By what modus operandi does credit restriction attain this result? In no other way than by the deliberate intensification of unemployment.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill (1925)

Way

“To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

On David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, in Chapter III, p. 41
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

Men , Motivation , Thinking , Sense

“The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section I, p. 15

Error , Idea , Parting

“If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.”

John Maynard Keynes

Attributed by [Will, Hutton, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/02/economics-economy-john-keynes, Will the real Keynes stand up, not this sad caricature?, Guardian, November 2, 2008, 2009-02-05]
Actual quote: "the Stock Exchange revalues many investments every day and the revaluations give a frequent opportunity to the individual (though not to the community as a whole) to revise his commitments. It is as though a farmer, having tapped his barometer after breakfast, could decide to remove his capital from the farming business between 10 and 11 in the morning and reconsider whether he should return to it later in the week."
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935), Ch. 12 http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch12.htm
Attributed

Sun

“But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter IV, Section III, p. 105

Dreams , Future

“The mechanism of reaching equilibrium by means of a rising cost of living, which is vainly pursued by a rising level of wages, will be described in the next chapter. But it is admitted on all hands that this is the worst possible solution.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 8 : Rationing Price Control and Wage Control

“For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

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

Age , Problem , Strong

“Economics is a very dangerous science.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Robert Malthus: The First of the Cambridge Economists, p. 128

Science

“Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VI, p. 238

“Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), Clissold (1927)

Love , Men , Money

“For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Source: Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 5

Way , Thinking , Parting

“The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section I, pp. 14-15

History , Change

“When, therefore, we enter the realm of State action, everything is to be considered and weighed on its merits. Changes in death duties, income tax, land tenure, licensing, game laws, church establishment, feudal rights, slavery, and so on through all ages, have received the same denunciations from the absolutists of contract, who are the real parents of revolution.”

John Maynard Keynes

A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), Ch. 2 : Public Finance and Changes in the Value of Money

Death , Age , Law , Game

“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher – in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician. Much, but not all, of this many-sidedness Marshall possessed. But chiefly his mixed training and divided nature furnished him with the most essential and fundamental of the economist's necessary gifts – he was conspicuously historian and mathematician, a dealer in the particular and the general, the temporal and the eternal, at the same time.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Alfred Marshall, p. 170; as cited in: Donald Moggridge (2002), Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, p. 424

Lie , Mood , Understanding , Nature

“The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Trotsky On England, p. 91

Waiting

“There is no harm in being sometimes wrong — especially if one is promptly found out.”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Alfred Marshall, p. 175

“The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VII, p. 254

“Why should coal miners suffer a lower standard of life than other classes of labour? They may be lazy, good-for-nothing fellows who do not work so hard or so long as they should. But is there any evidence that they are more lazy or more good-for-nothing than other people?
On grounds of social justice, no case can be made out for reducing. the wages of the miners. They are the victims of the economic Juggernaut. They represent in the flesh the "fundamental adjustments" engineered by the Treasury and the Bank of England to satisfy the impatience of the City fathers to bridge the "moderate gap" between $4.40 and $4.86. They (and others to follow) are the "moderate sacrifice" still necessary to ensure the stability of the gold standard. The plight of the coal miners is the first, but not—unless we are very lucky—the last, of the Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill (1925)

Life , People , Justice , Suffering

“Communism draws its strength from deeper, more serious sources. Offered to us as a means of improving the economic situation, it is an insult to our intelligence. But offered as a means of making the economic situation worse, that is its subtle, its almost irresistible, attraction. Communism is not a reaction against the failure of the nineteenth century to organize optimal economic output. It is a reaction against its comparative success.”

John Maynard Keynes

“Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 35

Optimism , Drawing , Success , Intelligence

“Shaw and Stalin are still satisfied with Marx’s picture of the capitalist world… They look backwards to what capitalism was, not forward to what it is becoming.”

John Maynard Keynes

“Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 34

World

“My only regret is that I have not drunk more champagne in my life.”

John Maynard Keynes

At a King's College college feast, as quoted in 1949, John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946, Fellow and Bursar, (A memoir prepared by direction of the Council of King’s College, Cambridge University, England), Cambridge University Press, 1949, page 37. This in turn quoted in Quote Investigator, " My Only Regret Is That I Have Not Drunk More Champagne In My Life https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/07/11/more-champagne/", 2013-07-11
Attributed

Life

“Being an optimist, I am still hopeful that it may end in the division of Spain geographically into two states. But, above all, I want the war to come to an end and not to extend.”

John Maynard Keynes

Letter to Kingsley Martin on the Spanish Civil War (9 August 1937), quoted in Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–45 (1968), p. 257
1930s

War , Hope

“If one is born a political animal, it is most uncomfortable not to belong to a political party; cold and lonely and futile it is.”

John Maynard Keynes

Am I a Liberal? (1925)

Animals

“How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world?”

John Maynard Keynes

Source: Laissez-faire and Communism (1926), pp. 99

World

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”

John Maynard Keynes

Preface
Variant: Paraphrased variant: The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
Source: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)

Idea