John Maynard Keynes

it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

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 …

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 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.

I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens.

Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged.

Marshall, remembering his mixed parentage, used to say 'Francis is a charming fellow, but you must be careful with Ysidro!'"

The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics.

There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.

Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis, and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.

Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to build an engine.

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong — especially if one is promptly found out.

Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.

Economics is a very dangerous science.

The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.

All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas — and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.

If Mr. Lloyd George had no good qualities, no charms, no fascinations, he would not be dangerous. If he were not a syren, we need not fear the whirlpools.

If not the wisest, yet the most truthful of men. If not the most personable, yet the queerest and sweetest. If not the most practical, yet of the purest public conscience. If not of high artistic genius, yet the most solid and sincere …

I have sought with some touches of detail to bring out the solidarity and historical continuity of the High Intelligentsia of England, who have built up the foundations of our thought in the two and a half centuries, since Locke, in his …

we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be …

The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, …

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.