John Maynard Keynes

"Perfection is not the enemy of the good; action is the enemy of paralysis."

"The distribution of income and wealth is the fundamental problem of all economic systems."

"We progress when we abandon the pretense of knowing things we do not actually know."

"Economic liberty is meaningless if political liberty is absent."

"The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones."

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

"In the long run, we are all dead."

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

"Ideas shape the course of history."

"The love of money as a possession is different from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life."

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

"The best time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining."

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

"The state of long-term expectation upon which our decisions depend is only slightly affected by facts."

"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men will do the nastiest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

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

"A man is not necessarily enlightened because he makes a good income."

"The economic problem is a secondary matter which should take the second place to real values."

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

"The General Theory is more important for the questions it raises than the answers it gives."

"Monetary production economy is an economy in which changing views about the future are capable of influencing the present situation."

"The mainsprings of human nature are not touched."

"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."

"We are all Keynesians now."

"Gold is a barbarous relic."

"The fundamental problem of capitalism is the inequality of wealth."

"I believe myself to be influenced by none but I am sure that the British tradition of empiricism combined with a ready abandonment of crude materialism has much to do with it."

"The problem of providing employment for everyone willing to work is capable of solution."

"Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own states of mind, and state of affairs in the concerns with our friends."

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