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.
Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged.
Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.
The idea behind stamped money is sound.
The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.
If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.
For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.
I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx .
It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.
If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism.
I am myself impressed by the great social advantages of increasing the stock of capital until it ceases to be scarce.
The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity-preference was the outstanding evil, the prime impediment to the growth of wealth, in the ancient and medieval worlds.
The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists .
The duty of “saving” became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.
But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future .
Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.
All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .
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.