Quotes / Thinkers / John Maynard Keynes
Thinker · 17 quotes
17 sourced quotes by John Maynard Keynes on economy, development & poverty, governance & administration, education & knowledge, science, technology & innovation, peace, non-violence & conflict, with a use case for each in GS4, Essay and interviews.
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The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already... but to do those things which at present are not done at all.
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
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.
Anything we can actually do we can afford.
Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance.
Nothing can be settled in isolation. Every use of our resources is at the expense of an alternative use.
Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.
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.
But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. 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 not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these.
The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.
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 problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.
I do not know which makes a man more conservative — to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
There is no harm in being sometimes wrong — especially if one is promptly found out.
Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.