John Maynard Keynes Quotes

Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.

Economics is not an exact science.

'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

Economics is not a discipline that comes to correct answers - economies are too complex.

Every democracy is constructed day-to-day. And the electoral process reduces and minimalizes every single aspect of human complexity. We're putting it into pamphlets. We're doing a publicity show. We're becoming symbols.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this.

People tend to simplify things.

There are two kinds of economists in the world. Those who don't know the future and those who don't know that they don't know the future.

I can observe the game theory is applied very much in economics. Generally, it would be wise to get into the mathematics as much as seems reasonable because the economists who use more mathematics are somehow more respected than those who use less. That's the trend.

Man is the circled oak; woman the ivy.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.

[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing.

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.