John Maynard Keynes

it makes them unworthy guides

a realm of thought where vested interest can be triumphant over the common good

These conclusions might be deemed obvious if experience did not show that many conservative bankers regard it as more consonant with their cloth, and also as economising thought, to shift public discussion

Nor can the fact that in time of war it is easier for the State to borrow than to tax, be allowed permanently to enslave the tax-payer to the bond-holder. Those who insist that in these matters the State is in exactly the same position as …

half the population would be no better than slaves

The powers of uninterrupted usury are too great. If the accretions of vested interest were to grow without mitigation

benefited new wealth at the expense of old, and armed enterprise against accumulation.

assisted the new men and emancipated them from the dead hand

the benefits of a depreciating currency

If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.

The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.

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

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

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 …

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

Men will not always die quietly.

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

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 will crowd and defile.

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

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

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

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 divided equitably.

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

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 observers, are attributed to the follies …