John Maynard Keynes

"Life is short and the mind becomes old in the service of a mechanical routine."

"I find myself more and more relying on the theoretical foundations of the classical economists."

"Man has always worked comparatively little for what he gets and as often as not has done nothing to secure it."

"The relation of the individual to the state is the fundamental problem of all economics."

"Assume that overwork is not excessively harmful and that most of us can do better by working longer."

"You can be sure that the forces of a practical businessman are vastly inferior to those of a speculative investor."

"Every man is supposed to have the object of his life before him."

"The problem of the twentieth century is how to organise a system so that it will really answer the questions it proposes to answer."

"I see us free to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue."

"The economic system is a carefully balanced system and cannot be altered without care at every point."

"Our main task is not to discover new ideas but to escape from the old ones."

"A monetary economy, we shall find, is essentially one in which changing views about the future are capable of influencing the present situation."

"Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation and organisation are, from this point onward, the economical furthering principles."

"I believe that the primary evil is not greed, but ignorance."

"In a stationary state, there would be no necessity for any capital."

"The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the rate of interest."

"We have involved ourselves in a colossal physical feat of no economic value to anyone."

"The purpose of open-mindedness is not as an end in itself, but as a means to discovering the truth."

"Capitalism itself is not intelligent; it is merely that some of the men who practice it are intelligent."

"The world is not governed by the considerations which economists are supposed to apply to it."

"An individual is free when he is conscious of the futility of the attempts which are made to compel him."

"I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present or nothing but the past."

"The difficulty of leaving the gold standard is both political and theoretical."

"A man may be convinced of a very absurd thing if he thinks long about it."

"The great virtue of a free market is that it prevents anyone from having too much power."

"Saving is the hard thing, not spending. The spendthrift is the patriot, not the miser."

"We must aim at a society where the best, brightest, and most able enter public life."

"The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order."

"All our political philosophers seem agreed in thinking that if we once admit the principle, the details must follow."

"Keynes is always right in the long run—which is to say, he is always dead in the long run."