Keynes Quotes

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.

At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.

..either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.

If only one person were perfectly informed there could never be a general crisis. But the only perfectly informed person is God, and he does not play the stock market.

He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.

Our attitude to these criticisms must be determined by our whole moral and emotional reaction to the future of international relations and the Peace of the World.

The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

This book (Jarod Kintz's book) is trash. I mean, I assume it is, because that's where I found it while scrounging for lunch. However, I must admit that I haven't read it. I would have, but I am homeless, mainly due to my illiteracy (though Big Government, Keynesian monetary policy, and my struggle with alcoholism certainly played a large role).

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.

The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles.

In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.