John Maynard Keynes Quotes

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

By this means (fractional reserve banking) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.

It's not bringing in the new ideas that are so hard; it's getting rid of the old ones.

It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.

Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.

When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.

Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.

The key to selecting the winner isn't choosing the face you think is the most beautiful but rather the face other people will pick

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.

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.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you're found out quickly.

The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.

If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

When the facts change, I change my mind.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.