The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

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

Ideas shape the course of history.

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.

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.

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

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

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