John Maynard Keynes 1st Baron of Tilton (1883–1946) was a British economist who transformed economic theory and policy by linking employment and income to public and private expenditure. The best-known economist of the twentieth century, he is also renowned for his role in the creation of new international monetary institutions in World War II.
Born in Cambridge to John Neville Keynes, a celebrated philosopher and economist, and Florence Ada Keynes, once mayor of Cambridge, John Maynard’s early work in economics developed from the Marshall tradition in Cambridge, but through the 1920s and 1930s, he progressively broke new ground.
Keynes’s Treatise on Money (1930) and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) heralded the Keynesian revolution. Keynes advocated the active intervention of government in the economy to stimulate employment and prosperity. This laid the foundation of modern macroeconomics—Keynesianism dominated Western economic discourse from the end of World War II until the mid-1970s. Keynes’s beliefs on a planned economy influenced Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ administration.
Keynes wrote Essays in Persuasion (1931) and Essays in Biography (1933.) He was also an astute collector of the writings of Isaac Newton.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Maynard Keynes
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 in a million is able to diagnose. … .
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Money
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be…
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: America
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Ideas
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Capitalism
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Difficulty, Ideas
The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
—John Maynard Keynes
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Economy, Economics
There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Money
Ideas shape the course of history.
—John Maynard Keynes
The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Capitalism
The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Money
I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Conservatives
Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Economics, Economy
It is safer to be a speculator than an investor in the sense that a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Wealth
It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Money
For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Greed
The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Profit
It’s important to choose not who you think is the prettiest girl, but who the judges will think is the prettiest girl.
—John Maynard Keynes
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Capitalism
In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.
—John Maynard Keynes
Canada is a place of infinite promise. We like the people, and if one ever had to emigrate, this would be the destination, not the U.S.A. The hills, lakes and forests make it a place of peace and repose of the mind, such as one never finds in the U.S.A.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Canada
The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
—John Maynard Keynes
One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Politics
One must not allow one’s attitude to securities which have a daily market quotation to be disturbed by this fact or lose one’s sense of proportion. Some Bursars will buy without a tremor unquoted and unmarketable investments in real estate which, if they had a selling quotation for immediate cash available at each Audit, would turn their hair grey. The fact that you do not know how much its ready money quotation fluctuates does not, as is commonly supposed, make an investment a safe one.
—John Maynard Keynes
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Taxes, Taxation
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Death, Dying
It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Ideas
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
—John Maynard Keynes
Topics: Thinking, Words
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