For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Ideas shape the course of history.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

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

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

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

In the long run we are all dead.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of reasons will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

We will not have any more crashes in our time.

If I owe you a pound I have a problem but if I owe you a million the problem is yours.

The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity preference was the outstanding evil the prime impediment to the growth of wealth in the ancient and medieval worlds.

Economics is a very dangerous science.

Education the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

Some gods may cross your path, but why should gods be beautiful? They could also be frightening.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.

There may or may not be a God or gods; the Siblings do not concern themselves with proving or disproving such a thing. By definition, gods are more powerful than men, and thus quite able to fend for themselves without help.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.

I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of anguish and guilt.

Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.