John Maynard Keynes Quotes

And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything.

Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round

We live in an abundant universe. Everything we need to take care of ourselves, those things are all around us. Don't focus on that economy. Don't believe that there's not enough for you.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

We are the sowers - our children are those who reap. We labor so that future generations will be better and nobler than we are.

There is enough for everyone. People think that there isn't enough, so they get as much as they can, so many people don't have enough.

The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example - a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see. It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery.

Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.

We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.

Your latter days are supposed to be greater than your former days.

We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.

Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers.

Those who are bent on revolutionizing society may be divided into those who seek something for themselves thereby and those who seek something for their children and grandchildren.

One must care about a world one will not see.

Man's record upon this wild world is the record of work, and of work alone.

Too much is the same as not enough.

Creating abundance [is] not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility.

My definition of prosperity would be quite different than what most people probably imagine or think, because I think that a wholeness word that means nothing missing, nothing broken. It's not finances or materialism.

Great men exist that there might be greater men.

Wouldst thou multiply thy riches? diminish them wisely; or wouldst thou make thy estate entire? divide it charitably. Seeds that are scattered increase; but, hoarded up, they perish.

The gods have given you wealth and the means of enjoying it.

Posterity will know as little of me as I know of posterity.

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word.

Economic progress and justice do not consist in superbly equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.