John Maynard Keynes Quotes

To abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.

All shall equal be. The Earl, the Marquis, and the Dook, The Groom, the Butler, and the Cook, The Aristocrat who banks with Coutts, The Aristocrat who cleans the boots.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

The courts, over time, have always responded to the dominant classes in our society.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

The messenger matters. When people of modest means complain about inequality, it usually gets written off as class warfare, but when billionaires complain, the problem is redefined.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

Class division in knowledge goes deeper than any other class division.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

On the battlefield, there is no distinction between upper and lower class.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

All past history with the exception of the primitive stages was the history of class struggles.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

My job is to raise issues relating to class in Ireland.