Keynes Quotes

• When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done

  John Maynard Keynes

  Country, Jobs, Done

  1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.

  Ben Bernanke

  Running, Long, Might

  5 Copy quote

• If you put two economists xin a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.

  Winston Churchill

  Two, Three, Investing

  5 Copy quote

• Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,' set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a great man!

  Milton Friedman

  Beautiful, Mean, Men

  Opinion Journal, July 22, 2006.

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter's prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes' excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.

  Benito Mussolini

  Book, Political, Politics

  "Universal Aspects of Fascism" by James Strachey Barnes, Williams and Norgate, London: UK, (pp. 113-114), 1928.

  90 Copy quote

  Show source

• I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes

  George Soros

  Kind, Economic, Reformers

  George Soros (2003). “The Alchemy of Finance”, p.372, John Wiley & Sons

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Book, Faithful, Fields

  Source: www.progressive.org

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the Western world, countries that were once the crucible of freedom are slipping remorselessly into a thinly disguised serfdom in which an ever higher proportion of your assets are annexed by the state as superlandlord. Big government is where nations go to die - not in Keynes' 'long run,' but sooner than you think.

  Mark Steyn

  Running, Country, Thinking

  6 Copy quote

• I don't have too much interest in teaching other people how to get rich. And that isn't because I fear the competition or anything like that - Warrenhas always been very open about what he's learned, and I share that ethos. My personal behavior model is Lord Keynes: I wanted to get rich so I could be independent, and so I could do other things like give talks on the intersection of psychology and economics. I didn't want to turn it into a total obsession.

  Charlie Munger

  Teaching, Independent, Ethos

  Charlie Munger's speech on the psychology of human misjudgment at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1995.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Notwithstanding all the passionate fulminations of the spokesmen of governments, the inevitable consequences of inflationism and expansionism...are coming to pass. And then, very late indeed, even simple people will discover that Keynes did not teach us how to perform the 'miracle...of turning a stone into bread,' but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Simple, Government, People

  4 Copy quote

• Friedrich Hayek, who died on March 23, 1992 at age 92, was arguably the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. By the time of his death, his fundamental way of thought had supplanted the system of John Maynard Keynes - his chief intellectual rival of the century - in the battle since the 1930s for the minds of economists and the policies of governments.

  Julian Simon

  Government, Mind, Intellectual

  9 Copy quote

• Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Couple, Mean, Responsibility

  Interview with Brian Lamb, Booknotes C-SPAN, November 13, 1994.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

  Neil Gaiman

  Cities, Healthy, London

  Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett (2011). “Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch”, p.44, Harper Collins

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not regard the Keynesian revolution as a great intellectual triumph. On the contrary, it was a tragedy because it came so late. Hitler had already found out how to cure unemployment before Keynes had finished explaining why it occured.

  Joan Robinson

  Intellectual, Tragedy, Revolution

  American Economic Association, Joan Robinson (1972). “The Second Crisis of Economic Theory: And Other Selected Papers from the American Economic Meeting, December 27-29, 1971”

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge.

  Jeffrey Tucker

  Heart, Mean, Government

  8 Copy quote

• Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially.

  Bill McKibben

  Average, Oil, Seductive

  7 Copy quote

• One of the most important skills of the economist, therefore, is that of simplification of the model. Two important methods of simplification have been developed by economists. One is the method of partial equilibrium analysis (or microeconomics), generally associated with the name of Alfred Marshall and the other is the method of aggregation (or macro-economics), associated with the name of John Maynard Keynes.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Skills, Names, Two

  "The Skills of the Economist". Book by Kenneth Ewart Boulding, p. 19, 1958.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes, but both reported it as a success.

  Terry Pratchett

  Responsibility, Milton

  Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett (2011). “Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch”, p.44, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Country, War, Government

  5 Copy quote

• As John Maynard Keynes taught us in the 1930s, in such situations, government is the only entity with both the motive and the ability to boost total spending by enough to put people back to work. As it happens there are long lists of important public projects that cry out to be done.

  Robert H. Frank

  Taught Us, Government, Long

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence.

  Bertrand Russell

  Responsibility, Thinking, America

  Bertrand Russell (2014). “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell”, p.69, Routledge

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's no automatic mechanism in a market system that reconciles the desire to save and the desire to invest. And therefore, the government has to sort of do something or the Federal Reserve, the Fed, or the Central Bank, or whatever, it has to intervene. It has to create enough investment for the economy not to suffer from a fall in aggregate demand. So, if you don't have a balance within the market system itself, then you need an external balance and that's what I think Keynes believed.

  Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky

  Fall, Thinking, Suffering

  Source: bigthink.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Keynes was chief economic adviser to the British government and largely responsible for keeping the British economy afloat at a time when more than half of our gross national product, and all of our foreign exchange, was being spent on the war. I was lucky to be present at one of his rare appearances in Cambridge, when he gave a lecture with the title "Newton, the Man." Four years later he died of heart failure, precipitated by overwork and the hardships of crossing the Atlantic repeatedly in slow propeller-driven airplanes under wartime conditions.

  Freeman Dyson

  War, Heart, Airplane

  "The Scientist As Rebel". Book by Freeman Dyson, 2006.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ridiculous as our market volatility might seem to an intelligent Martian, it is our reality and everyone loves to trot out the 'quote' attributed to Keynes (but never documented): 'The market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent.' For us agents, he might better have said 'The market can stay irrational longer than the client can stay patient.'

  Jeremy Grantham

  Intelligent, Reality, Clients

  6 Copy quote

• Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".

  Leonard Woolf

  Stupidity, Letters, Faces

  9 Copy quote