Quotes by John Maynard Keynes

“Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and in...”

“In the long run we are all dead.”

“Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.”

“The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.”

“At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.”

“We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other ...”

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

“The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.”

“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.”

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

“Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a d...”

“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 problem...”

“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.”

“The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.”

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

“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

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

“The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.”

“The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.”

“Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test ...”