262 Quotes by John Maynard Keynes

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

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

It is investment, i.e. the increased production of material wealth in the shape of capital goods, which alone increases national wealth.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

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.

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

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

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.