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John Maynard Keynes QUOTES

John Maynard Keynes QUOTES

81 " I believe that the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated
introspection. A case can be made out, as it also can with Descartes, for regarding him as an accomplished
experimentalist. Nothing can be more charming than the tales of his mechanical contrivances when he was a
boy. There are his telescopes and his optical experiments, These were essential accomplishments, part of his
unequalled all-round technique, but not, I am sure, his peculiar gift, especially amongst his contemporaries.
His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had
seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and
most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific or
philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one's mind and apply all one's
powers of concentration to piercing through it, and how it will dissolve and escape and you find that what
you are surveying is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and
weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it
up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary
- 'so happy in his conjectures', said De Morgan, 'as to seem to know more than he could possibly have any
means of proving'. The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards - they
were not the instrument of discovery. "

― John Maynard Keynes

82 " I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national. "

― John Maynard Keynes

83 " Lenin is said to have declared that the bestway to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscatearbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. "

― John Maynard Keynes , The Economic Consequences of the Peace

84 " Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilisation. "

― John Maynard Keynes

85 " As one broods over these queer collections, it seems easier to understand - with an understanding which is
not, I hope, distorted in the other direction - this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe at
the time when within these walls he. was solving so much, that he could reach all the secrets of God and
Nature by the pure power of mind Copernicus and Faustus in one. "

― John Maynard Keynes

86 " La cosa importante per il governo non è fare ciò che gli individui fanno già, e farlo un po' meglio o un po' peggio, ma fare ciò che presentemente non si fa del tutto. "

― John Maynard Keynes

87 " the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. "

― John Maynard Keynes

88 " Obviously consumption-goods, taken as a whole, have in this sense the longest period of production, since of every productive process they constitute the last stage. Thus if the first impulse towards the increase in effective demand comes from an increase in consumption, the initial elasticity of employment will be further below its eventual equilibrium-level than if the impulse comes from an increase in investment. Moreover, "

― John Maynard Keynes , The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

89 " If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation. "

― John Maynard Keynes , The Economic Consequences of the Peace

90 " There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. "

― John Maynard Keynes , The Economic Consequences of the Peace

91 " The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll "

― John Maynard Keynes ,

92 " The hope of a very favourable outcome, which may balance the risk in the mind of the borrower, is not available to solace the lender. "

― John Maynard Keynes , The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

93 " Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live. "

― John Maynard Keynes , The Economic Consequences of the Peace

94 " Thus, after all, the actual rates of aggregate saving and spending do not depend on Precaution, Foresight, Calculation, Improvement, Independence, Enterprise, Pride or Avarice. Virtue and vice play no part. It all depends on how far the rate of interest is favourable to investment, after taking account of the marginal efficiency of capital. No, this is an overstatement. If the rate of interest were so governed as to maintain continuous full employment, virtue would resume her sway;-- the rate of capital accumulation would depend on the weakness of the propensity to consume. Thus, once again, the tribute that classical economists pay to her is due to their concealed assumption that the rate of interest always is so governed. "

― John Maynard Keynes , The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

95 " I also want to emphasise strongly the point about economics being a moral science. I mentioned before that it deals with introspection and with values. I might have added that it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One has to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogeneous in the same way that the material of the other sciences, in spite of its complexity, is constant and homogeneous. It is as though the fall of the apple to the ground depended on the apple's motives, on whether it is worth while falling to the ground, and whether the ground wanted the apple to fall, and on mistaken calculations on the part of the apple as to how far it was from the centre of the earth. "

― John Maynard Keynes

96 " Spirit of the Years

Observe that all wide sight and self-command
Deserts these throngs now driven to demonry
By the Immanent Unrecking. Nought remains
But vindictiveness here amid the strong,
And there amid the weak an impotent rage. "

― John Maynard Keynes , The Economic Consequences of the Peace

97 " Wage flexibility may not cure an ailing economy, but simply make the rich richer and the poor poorer; you get an economy driven not by wages, but by assets and if those assets stay in the same hands, there is no dynamism and social mobility. "

― John Maynard Keynes , The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

98 " Epe luzera hilda egongo gara denok. "

― John Maynard Keynes

99 " Practical man, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the sleeves of some defunct economist "

― John Maynard Keynes , The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

100 " Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the sleeves of some defunct economist "

― John Maynard Keynes , The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money