The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
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.
It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
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.
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
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.
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.
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 political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
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
The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.
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.
If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.
The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exulted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the highest virtues.
But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn't you argue the other side?" He said, "That's true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do?
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
Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
Ideas shape the course of history.
When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
The love of money as a possession-as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life-will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
In the long run, we are all dead!
By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against (Einstein). He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing?
The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.
Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.
When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.
How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?
If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.
When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, Sir?
In the long run we are all dead.
[People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives.
The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping the old ones.
Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railroad or organise a Trust or at least swindle the investing public
With the breakdown of money economy the practice of international barter is becoming prevalent.
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.
Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
Men will not always die quietly.
[People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other altertives.
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.
