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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.

John Maynard Keynes

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John Maynard Keynes
Age: 62 †
Born: 1883
Born: June 5
Died: 1946
Died: April 21
Businessperson
Diplomat
Economist
Mathematician
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Lord Keynes
Baron Keynes of Tilton
Activity
Tolerable
Society
Businessman
Sense
Activities
Long
Held
Gains
Bear
Relation
Roughly
Bears
Contributed

More quotes by John Maynard Keynes

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Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
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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.
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Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits-a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.
John Maynard Keynes
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The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.
John Maynard Keynes
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If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
John Maynard Keynes
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By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
John Maynard Keynes
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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
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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.
John Maynard Keynes
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Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
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If we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want.
John Maynard Keynes
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I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize - not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years - the way the world thinks about economic problems.
John Maynard Keynes
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Too large a proportion of recent mathematical economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
John Maynard Keynes
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Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.
John Maynard Keynes
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It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
John Maynard Keynes
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Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
John Maynard Keynes
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I am myself impressed by the great social advantages of increasing the stock of capital until it ceases to be scarce.
John Maynard Keynes
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Ideas shape the course of history.
John Maynard Keynes
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I was suffering from my chronic delusion that one good share is safer than ten bad ones, and I am always forgetting that hardly anyone else shares this particular delusion.
John Maynard Keynes
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The numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.
John Maynard Keynes
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I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.
John Maynard Keynes