All Quotes

"The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind."

"The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists."

"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 immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably."

"The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion."

"In writing thus I do not necessarily disparage the practices of that generation. In the unconscious recesses of its being Society knew what it was about. The cake was really very small in proportion to the appetites of consumption, and no one, if it were shared all round, would be much the better off by the cutting of it. Society was working not for the small pleasures of today but for the future security and improvement of the race,—in fact for "progress." If only the cake were not cut but was allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest, perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors."

"I seek only to point out that the principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of Society and of progress as we then understood it, and to emphasize that this principle depended on unstable psychological conditions, which it may be impossible to recreate. It was not natural for a population, of whom so few enjoyed the comforts of life, to accumulate so hugely. The war has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all and the vanity of abstinence to many. Thus the bluff is discovered; the labouring classes may be no longer willing to forgo so largely, and the capitalist classes, no longer confident of the future, may seek to enjoy more fully their liberties of consumption so long as they last, and thus precipitate the hour of their confiscation."

"He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least."

"The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense."

"To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party."

"The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated."

"The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile."

"But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future."

"Men will not always die quietly."

"The ignorance of even the best-informed investor about the more remote future is much greater than his knowledge, and he cannot but be influenced to a degree which would seem wildly disproportionate to anyone who really knew the future, and be forced to seek a clue mainly here to trends further ahead. But if this is true of the best-informed, the vast majority of those who are concerned with the buying and selling of securities know almost nothing whatever about what they are doing. They do not possess even the rudiments of what is required for a valid judgement, and are the prey of hopes and fears easily aroused by transient events and as easily dispelled."

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was 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. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

"Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand."

"Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little."

"The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted."

"If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp."

"That she [France] has anything to fear from Germany in the future which we can foresee, except what she may herself provoke, is a delusion. When Germany has recovered her strength and pride, as in due time she will, many years must pass before she again casts her eyes Westwards. Germany's future now lies to the East, and it is in that direction her hopes and ambitions, when they revive, will certainly turn."

"The real struggle today, just as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is between a view of the world termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth and that other view, militarist or rather diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture and hereditary or racial prejudice. To the good English radical, the latter is so unreal, so crazy in its combination of futility and evil, that he is often in danger of forgetting or disbelieving its actual existence."

"The supporters of Monetary Reform, of which I... am a more convinced adherent than before, as the most important and significant measure Great Britain can take to increase economic welfare, must expound their arguments more fully... before they can overwhelm the forces of old custom and general ignorance... [F]luctuations of trade and employment... the greatest and the most remediable of the economic diseases of modern society... are mainly diseases of our credit and banking system..."

"He was the nicest, and the only talented person I saw in all Berlin, except perhaps old Fuerstenberg … and Kurt Singer. And he was a Jew; and so was Fuerstenberg. And my dear Melchior is a Jew too. Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite. For the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind of Jews, the ones who are not imps but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains. I vote rather for the plump hausfraus and thick fingered Wandering Birds. But I am not sure that I wouldn’t even rather be mixed up with Lloyd George than with the German political Jews."

"The power of taxation by currency depreciation is one which has been inherent in the State since Rome discovered it. The creation of legal-tender has been and is a Government’s ultimate reserve; and no State or Government is likely to decree its own bankruptcy or its own downfall, so long as this instrument still lies at hand unused. Besides this, […] the benefits of a depreciating currency are not restricted to the Government. Farmers and debtors and all persons liable to pay fixed money dues share in the advantage. As now in the persons of business men, so also in former ages these classes constituted the active and constructive elements in the economic scheme. Those secular changes, therefore, which in the past have depreciated money, assisted the new men and emancipated them from the dead hand; they benefited new wealth at the expense of old, and armed enterprise against accumulation."

"The tendency of money to depreciate has been at times a weighty counterpoise against the cumulative results of compound interest and the inheritance of fortunes. It has been a loosening influence against the rigid distribution of old-won wealth and the separation of ownership from activity. By this means each generation can disinherit in part its predecessors' heirs; and the project of founding a perpetual fortune must be disappointed in this way, unless the community with conscious deliberation provides against it in some other way, more equitable and more expedient."

"Free trade is profoundly based on the assumption of equilibrium conditions and in particular that wages always fall to their strict economic level. If they do not, and if for several reasons we do not desire them to, then it is only by means of a tariff that the ideal distribution of resources between different uses, which free trade aims at, can be achieved; and there is an unanswerable theoretical case for a countervailing import duty (and also for an export bounty) equivalent to the difference between the actual wage and the economic wage. ... I am no longer a free trader – and I believe that practically no-one else is – in the old sense of the term to the extent of believing in a very high degree of national specialisation and in abandoning any industry which is unable for the time being to hold its own. Where wages are immobile, this would be an extraordinarily dangerous doctrine to follow."

"There is a respectable and influential body of opinion which, repudiating with vehemence the adoption of either expedient, fulminates alike against Devaluations and Levies, on the ground that they infringe the untouchable sacredness of contract; or rather of vested interest, for an alteration of the legal tender and the imposition of a tax on property are neither of them in the least illegal or even contrary to precedent. Yet such persons, by overlooking one of the greatest of all social principles, namely the fundamental distinction between the right of the individual to repudiate contract and the right of the State to control vested interest, are the worst enemies of what they seek to preserve. For nothing can preserve the integrity of contract between individuals, except a discretionary authority in the State to revise what has become intolerable. The powers of uninterrupted usury are too great. If the accretions of vested interest were to grow without mitigation for many generations, half the population would be no better than slaves to the other half. Nor can the fact that in time of war it is easier for the State to borrow than to tax, be allowed permanently to enslave the tax-payer to the bond-holder. Those who insist that in these matters the State is in exactly the same position as the individual, will, if they have their way, render the continuance of an individualistic society, which depends for its existence on moderation. These conclusions might be deemed obvious if experience did not show that many conservative bankers regard it as more consonant with their cloth, and also as economising thought, to shift public discussion of financial topics off the logical on to an alleged "moral" plane, which means a realm of thought where vested interest can be triumphant over the common good without further debate. But it makes them unworthy guides in a perilous age of transition. The State must never neglect the importance of so acting in ordinary matters to promote certainty and security in business. But it makes them untrustworthy guides in a perilous age of transition. The State is a sovereign body of which the purpose is to promote the greatest good of the whole. When, therefore, we enter the realm of State action, everything is to be considered and weighed on its merits. Changes in Death Duties, Income Tax, Land Tenure, Licensing, Game Laws, Church Establishment, Feudal Rights, Slavery, and so on through all ages, have received the same denunciations from the absolutists of contract, who are the real parents of Revolution."

"But this 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 long past, the ocean is flat again."

"Those who advocate the return to a gold standard do not always appreciate along what different lines our actual practice has been drifting. If we restore the gold standard, are we to return also to the pre-war conceptions of bank-rate, allowing the tides of gold to play what tricks they like with the internal price-level, and abandoning the attempt to moderate the disastrous influence of the credit-cycle on the stability of prices and employment? Or are we to continue and develop the experimental innovations of our present policy, ignoring the "bank ration" and, if necessary, allowing unmoved a piling up of gold reserves far beyond our requirements or their depletion far below them? In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic."

"Ch. 4, p. 172"

"It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive "natural liberty" in their economic activities. There is no "compact" conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire."

"It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these."

"We must aim at separating those services which are technically social from those which are technically individual. The most important Agenda of the State relate not to those activities which private individuals are already fulfilling, but to those functions which fall outside the sphere of the individual, to those decisions which are made by no one if the State does not make them."

"The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already... but to do those things which at present are not done at all."

"Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance."

"It is because particular individuals, fortunate in situation or in abilities, are able to take advantage of uncertainty and ignorance, and also because for the same reason big business is often a lottery, that great inequalities of wealth come about; and these same factors are also the cause of the Unemployment of Labour, or the disappointment of reasonable business expectations, and of the impairment of efficiency and production."

"The time has... come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of Population... is most expedient."

"Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but... in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life."

"There is no party in the world... pursuing right aims by right methods. Material Poverty provides the incentive to change... where there is very little margin for experiments. Material Prosperity removes the incentive just when it might be safe to take a chance."

"Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history."

"There is... no so-called important political question so really unimportant, so irrelevant to the re-organization of the economic life of Great Britain, as the Nationalisation of the Railways."

"How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world?"

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

"I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimise, rather than with those who would maximise, economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible; and, above all, let finance be primarily national. ... For these strong reasons, therefore, I am inclined to the belief that...a greater measure of national self-sufficiency than existed in 1914 may tend to serve the cause of peace, rather than otherwise."

"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. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed."

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

"Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own."

"It seems to me that today's news about Germany cannot be taken too seriously. The hideous dilemma is presented – allowing them to call our bluff, and re-arm as and when they choose, with what results one can imagine, or the horror of a preventive war."

"Marxists are ready to sacrifice the political liberties of individuals in order to change the existing economic order. So are Fascists and Nazis. That is why I said that those who had toyed with Marxist ideas could not have a clear conscience in defending the political liberties of individuals from reactionary attacks."