Keynes Quotes

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

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

“Neither Fascist Italy nor Spain adopted eugenics as an ideology central to their form of government the way the National Socialist did. However, socialist and progressive nations such as Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway did adopt and implement eugenics. This is because eugenics is the safety valve of a centrally planned economy. Central planners like John Maynard Keynes fear a population that is not as meticulously planned as the economy. They fear the unproductive sectors out-breeding the productive sectors of the population. This is also why Keynes was a lobbyist for the British eugenics movement both before and after The Holocaust.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.”