In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes.
I was suffering from my chronic delusion that one good share is safer than ten bad ones, and I am always forgetting that hardly anyone else shares this particular delusion.
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
The principle objectives in life are love, the creation and enjoyment if aesthetic experience, the pursuit of knowledge. Love comes a long way first.
The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.
One’s knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.
To suppose that safety-first consists in having a small gamble in a large number of different companies where I have no information to reach a good judgment, as compared with a substantial stake in a company where one’s information is adequate, strikes me as a travesty of investment policy.
It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.
God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
Our attitude to these criticisms must be determined by our whole moral and emotional reaction to the future of international relations and the Peace of the World.
I only wish I had drunk more champagne.
It is a mistake to think businessmen are more immoral than politicians.
But if America recalls for a moment what Europe has meant to her and still means to her, what Europe, the mother of art and of knowledge, in spite of everything, still is and still will be, will she not reject these counsels of indifference and isolation, and interest herself in what may prove decisive issues for the progress and civilization of all mankind?
If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation.
I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.
A monetary economy, we shall find, is essentially one in which changing views about the future are capable of influencing the quantity of employment and not merely its direction.
My only regret is that I have not drunk more champagne in my life.