It is extraordinarily difficult to secure the right outcome for this r — John Maynard Keynes

"The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind."

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

"Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul — religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient."

"But when we come to consider the problem of party positively—by what attracts... the aspect is dismal in every party alike, whether we put our hopes in measures or in men. ...The historic party questions of the nineteenth century are as dead as last weeks mutton; and whilst the questions of the future are looming up, they have not yet become party questions, and they cut across the old party lines."

"I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."

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