Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant’s profit, we have begun to change our civilization.
Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.
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?
It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you’re found out quickly.
Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case.
I am trying to re-shape and improve my central position.
A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.
Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
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.
Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance.
The power to become habituated to his surroundings and therefore to no longer be grateful for what is good in it is a marked characteristic of mankind and needs to be fought against if a person is to be happy.
Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.
Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget.
Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught.
The insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men...
The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.
The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.
The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.
Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides.
I should have drunk more Champagne.