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There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.

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
Sometimes
Promptly
Programming
Harm
Especially
Wrong
Found

More quotes by John Maynard Keynes

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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.
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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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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Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.
John Maynard Keynes
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It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.
John Maynard Keynes
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A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
John Maynard Keynes
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What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!
John Maynard Keynes
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The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
John Maynard Keynes
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There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
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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I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens.
John Maynard Keynes
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The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.
John Maynard Keynes
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... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.
John Maynard Keynes
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The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
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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The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.
John Maynard Keynes
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It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.
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.
John Maynard Keynes
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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?
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