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Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole.

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
Faces
Picks
Photographs
Awarded
May
Photograph
Prize
Corresponds
Whole
Competition
Nearly
Preferences
Average
Professional
Prettiest
Choice
Newspapers
Competitor
Whose
Pick
Competitors
Hundred
Investment
Preference
Likened
Choices
Six
Newspaper
Competitions

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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.
John Maynard Keynes
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The key to selecting the winner isn't choosing the face you think is the most beautiful but rather the face other people will pick
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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One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.
John Maynard Keynes
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Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.
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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The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
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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But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn't you argue the other side? He said, That's true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do?
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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If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
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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Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
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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The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
John Maynard Keynes
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Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.
John Maynard Keynes
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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