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This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. 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.

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
Running
Seasons
Guide
Tempestuous
Tell
Economics
Current
Misleading
Past
Tasks
Guides
Economists
Long
Ocean
Currents
Mislead
Dead
Task
Economist
Easy
Useless
Flat
Science
Affair
Flats
Death
Storm
Affairs

More quotes by John Maynard Keynes

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When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
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How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?
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The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.
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
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It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.
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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.
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[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.
John Maynard Keynes
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Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo ! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.
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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 extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
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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
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The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
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When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.
John Maynard Keynes
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It is Enterprise which build and improves the world's possessions...If Enterprise is afoot, Wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift and if Enterprise is asleep, Wealth decays, whatever Thrift may be doing.
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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.
John Maynard Keynes
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The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.
John Maynard Keynes
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Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.
John Maynard Keynes
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It is the long-term investor...who will in practice come in for the most criticism... For it is the essence of his behavior that he should be eccentric, unconventional, and rash in the eyes of average opinion
John Maynard Keynes
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Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case
John Maynard Keynes