The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
When the facts change, I change my mind.
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.
Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back
All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .
The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.
If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
Ideas shape the course of history.
I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.
The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light ofthe past for the purposes of the future
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.
The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.
Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: