John Maynard Keynes

"The beauty of a good theory is that it explains much with little."

"We have the power to manage the economy if we choose to use it."

"History shows that civilization advances when creative and thinking individuals challenge convention."

"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

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

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency."

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?"

"I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal."

"The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance."

"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In economic wars nations battle each other to control resources and trade."

"It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong."

"The human race faces a cruel choice: work or daytime television."

"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency."

"Successful investing is about buying assets at prices below their intrinsic value."

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

"In the long run, the market is a weighing machine."

"The great beauty of the gold standard is that it enforces discipline on governments."

"Marxism is taking root in the university precisely because the university, in the conventional sense, is ceasing to exist."

"We are all infected with monstrous absurdities."

"The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy."

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

"The art of central banking is the art of managing the publics confidence."

"Good versus evil is a false dichotomy. Most of us are muddled combinations of both."

"The problem is not the problems we have, but our inability to accept them."

"A monetary economy is unstable, and the attempt to stabilize it is foredoomed to failure."

"I find myself more and more relying on the theory of animal spirits."