Quotes by John Maynard Keynes

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate secretly and unobserved an important part of the wealth ...”

“Ideas shape the course of history.”

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping the old ones.”

“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 ...”

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

“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...”

“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 di...”

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

“In writing thus I do not necessarily disparage the practices of that generation. In the unconscious recesses of its being Society knew what it was about. The cake was really very small in proportio...”

“I seek only to point out that the principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of Society and of progress as we then understood it, and to emphasize that this...”

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

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

“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 thinkin...”

“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 p...”

“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 ...”

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

“Men will not always die quietly.”

“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 unobser...”

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

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