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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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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
Wealth
Morals
Social
Longer
Virtues
Two
Principles
Qualities
Able
Virtue
Code
Human
Shall
Changes
Ridden
Humans
Quality
Importance
Distasteful
Many
High
Hundred
Pseudo
Great
Highest
Accumulation
Years
Moral

More quotes by John Maynard Keynes

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The love of money as a possession...will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.
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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How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?
John Maynard Keynes
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The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence.
John Maynard Keynes
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Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
John Maynard Keynes
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Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
John Maynard Keynes
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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.
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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[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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I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
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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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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The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
John Maynard Keynes
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The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
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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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.
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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In a regime of Free Trade and free economic intercourse it would be of little consequence that iron lay on one side of a political frontier, and labour, coal, and blast furnaces on the other. But as it is, men have devised ways to impoverish themselves and one another and prefer collective animosities to individual happiness.
John Maynard Keynes
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Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.
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