Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the most wicked things for the greatest good of everyone.
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
Chess is a cure for headaches.
This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.
I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.
The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.
When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
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.
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.
The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.
We will not have any more crashes in our time.