103 quotes
How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing?
The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics.
Essays In Biography (1933)
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis, and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
Essays In Biography (1933)
I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
But 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.
A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)
The old saying holds. Owe your banker £1000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed.
Comfort and habits let us be ready to forgo, but I am not ready for a creed which does not care how much it destroys the liberty and security of daily life, which uses deliberately the weapons of persecution, destruction and international strife.
Essays in Persuasion (1931)
There were endless possibilities, not out of reach.
Essays In Biography (1933)
Shaw and Stalin are still satisfied with Marx’s picture of the capitalist world… They look backwards to what capitalism was, not forward to what it is becoming.
On the negative test, I incline to believe that the Liberal Party is still the best instrument of future progress—if only it had strong leadership and the right programme.
Essays in Persuasion (1931)
Thus public works even of doubtful utility may pay for themselves over and over again at a time of severe unemployment, if only from the diminished cost of relief expenditure.
This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid.
Essays in Persuasion (1931)
There was an attraction at first that Mr Baldwin should not be clever. But when he forever sentimentalises about his own stupidity, the charm is broken.
There is... no so-called important political question so really unimportant, so irrelevant to the re-organization of the economic life of Great Britain, as the Nationalisation of the Railways.
Laissez-faire and Communism (1926)
To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol — a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit.
We and France have only sacrificed our honour and our engagements to a civilised and faithful nation, and fraternised with what is vile.
Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to build an engine.
Essays In Biography (1933)
Anything we can actually do we can afford.
Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance.
The End of Laissez-faire (1926)