John Maynard Keynes

It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

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

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

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

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.

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.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

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

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.

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.

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

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