John Maynard Keynes Past Quotations

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light ofthe past for the purposes of the future

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.

All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .