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

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.

As a nation we should commit ourselves not only to the fight against terrorism, but to economic justice, defeat of the AIDS epidemic and vestiges of discriminatory policies of all kinds.

It wasn't my plan to create such a record. All I did was put in the effort to win every match I played and it went on for weeks, months and years until my defeat to Ross Norman in Toulouse in 1986.

The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

I'm a political scientist and I study these things, and I know that economic problems, with the rising unemployment and inflation and low productivity and so forth, were a factor in that election, in that defeat of President Carter.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

You don't have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn't know you possessed.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.