I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens.
Investment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.
I can’t remember my telephone number, but I know it was in the high numbers.
Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.
I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.
In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes.
I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.
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.
Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.
Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant’s profit, we have begun to change our civilization.
To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.
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.