35 Inspirational John Maynard Keynes Quotes On Success

John Maynard Keynes was an English economist, whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. By the late 1930s, leading Western economies had begun adopting Keynes’s policy recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of the two decades following Keynes’s death in 1946. As a leader of the British delegation, Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II but was overruled by the American delegation on several aspects. Keynes’s influence started to wane in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists, who disputed the ability of government to favourably regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy. May these John Maynard Keynes Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.” John Maynard Keynes

2. “When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.” John Maynard Keynes

3. “The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.” John Maynard Keynes

4. “By this means (fractional reserve banking) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.” John Maynard Keynes

5. “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.” John Maynard Keynes

6. “Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.” John Maynard Keynes

7. “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” John Maynard Keynes

8. “I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable.” John Maynard Keynes

9. “As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes. It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence, One’s knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.” John Maynard Keynes

10. “Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.” John Maynard Keynes

11. “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.” John Maynard Keynes

12. “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.” John Maynard Keynes

13. “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.” John Maynard Keynes

14. “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.” John Maynard Keynes

15. “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.” John Maynard Keynes

16. “There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.” John Maynard Keynes

17. “By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” John Maynard Keynes

18. “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” John Maynard Keynes

19. “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” John Maynard Keynes

20. “Ideas shape the course of history.” John Maynard Keynes

21. “Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.” John Maynard Keynes

22. “When the facts change, I change my mind.” John Maynard Keynes

23. “It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.” John Maynard Keynes

24. “Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” John Maynard Keynes

25. “Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.” John Maynard Keynes

26. “The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.” John Maynard Keynes

27. “Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.” John Maynard Keynes

28. “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.” John Maynard Keynes

29. “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.” John Maynard Keynes

30. “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.” John Maynard Keynes

31. “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?” John Maynard Keynes

32. “It is the long term investor who will in practice come in for the most criticism. For it is the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of the average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” John Maynard Keynes

33. “The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.” John Maynard Keynes

34. “Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.” John Maynard Keynes

35. “The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.” John Maynard Keynes

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