The friends of gold will have to be extremely wise and moderate if they are to avoid a revolution.
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.
It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.
The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit.
Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.
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.
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.
Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
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.
He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen.
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.
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.
It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone, particularly in economics.
Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.
It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.