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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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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
Special
Littles
Enterprises
Reason
Spreading
Little
Enterprise
Much
Confidence
Think
Limits
Thinking
Risk
Mistake

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The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and moderate if they are to avoid a revolution.
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There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
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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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The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
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It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.
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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.
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Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.
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The Economic Problem...the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.
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All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .
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If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
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Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.
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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.
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Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.
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...By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract,... governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century.
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