John Maynard Keynes Quotes

It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

If you have a sense that your money is somehow, even indirectly, contributing to a cause that you find morally problematic, then it seems somewhere between reasonable and obligatory for you to vote with your dollars.

People who have money have an obligation. I wouldn't say I'm entitled to tell them what to do with it but to use it wisely.

Of course, bankers were always interested in making money. But when bankers had clients, they bore some responsibility for the clients' welfare.

What counts is what you do with your money, not where it came from.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

[Guarantees of freedom] will be found to consist in the highest protection of the individual and of society, chiefly against public power, because it is necessarily from this power that the greatest danger threatens the citizen, or that the most serious infringement of untrammeled action is to be feared.

Money has a language of its own.

Whosoever has money has power. It's not about a label. If you have money tomorrow, you will be powerful.

Money is not of the devil. It depends on who's controlling it.

To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.

I'm trying to engage issues of power and sexuality and money and life and death and power. Power is the most free-flowing element in society, maybe next to money, but in fact they both motor each other.

The desire for wealth is nearly universal, and none can say it is not laudable, provided the possessor of it accepts its responsibilities, and uses it as a friend to humanity.

Money, as it increases, becomes either the master or the slave of ts owner.

Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.

Government is saying to the average citizen every January 1: 'For the next five months you'll be working for us, for goals we shall determine. Is that clear? After May 5 you may look after your own needs and ambitions, but report back to us next January. Now move along.' ... If nearly half of what you make is spent by someone else, that means that half your work time is spent working for someone else. Call me a radical, but I think that comes dangerously close to being a form of indentured servitude.

The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned - the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach - is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.

Money is meant not for hoarding, but for using; the aim of life should be to use it in the right way - to spend as much as we can lawfully spend, both upon ourselves and others. And sometimes it is better to do this in our lifetime, when we can see that it is well spent, than to leave it to the chance spending of those that come after us.

The biggest shock when I lost it all was the realization that so much of my life had been out of my control. When I started to make the money back, I vowed that it would never happen again. I bought things only when I could afford them. There was no big mortgage, no cars on hire purchase. I remember buying a TR6 sports car for £6,000, and funnily enough it gave me more pleasure than the Porsche ever had.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other.

Ethics and power are separate. Ethics and morality. I think life would be miserable if there weren't some kind of code that people operated by, but history is full of many, many people who have gotten power by very unethical means, and people who were very ethical, who get no power, people who have the most brilliant, lovely, wonderful, nice intentions and bring about horrible things in the world because they don't know how to play the power game.

It is marriage, perhaps, which had given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the state.... It is a true freedom because it is a true fulfilment, for man, woman and children. Do we then want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the State.