Universal Man Quotes

“The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things that 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.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Our old ideas are not so much overthrown as upset. The old is not destroyed; it is replaced. We simply learn to see new things in a different light.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worthwhile?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little, and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. G. H. Hardy”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54

‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55

Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing.

A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Under my tutelage you will be safe’: the phrase is derived from ‘me duce tutus eris’ in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, with the literal meaning ‘with me as a leader you will be safe’.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“I dare to speak for the much-abused so-called experts,’ he told his fellow peers in a parliamentary debate. ‘I even venture sometimes to prefer them, without intending any disrespect, to politicians. The common love of truth, bred of a scientific habit of mind, is the closest of bonds.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“It is from time to time the duty of a serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself,”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Keynes was patrician in outlook. He suspected that liberty was incompatible with equality, and had a sharp preference for liberty over the chimera of equality.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“party passions led to muddled or dishonest thinking, made people unreasonable or stereotypical, and lacked long-term perspective.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“These virtuosi maintained that whatever has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, is likely to be untrue.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Connoisseurs need not be aristocratic, but must adopt or reject people and tastes according to a patrician sensibility that ignores the worlds of productivity and profit. Money is esteemed as a means to acquire what they value, but despised as a provider of power, showiness, luxury, over-eating or barbarous hobbies.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Keynes had the happiest of marriages, and the best of wives for him, but marital contentment narrowed his outlook and temper.77”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Contraception was an issue of women’s freedom for Keynes, who also recommended in 1925 that women’s pay must be regulated to ensure fairness. It took over forty years for Keynes’s pioneering views to be met by legislation: male homosexuality was partially decriminalized and contraception made available to all women under the Sexual Offences and Family Planning Acts of 1967; the injustice of women’s low earnings was first addressed in the Equal Pay Act of 1970.73”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“(Until the 1980s English Customs officers were instructed to treat any traveller carrying condoms in their luggage as a suspect person, and to search for drugs or other unlawful items.)”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“The painter and the dancer had similar sensibilities: they were responsive, instinctual, imaginative, sympathetic, astute and unstudied.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“The variables which were apt for management by central authorities were interest rates and taxation, which he proposed that governments should adjust in order to stimulate investment and to seek full employment. However, he said little of emergency public works, and nothing about fiscal methods of demand management. He did not recommend increasing the government’s current expenditure by running a budget deficit to meet a deficiency of demand. He gave no encouragement to profligate finance ministers. He urged that additional government expenditure should be on capital account and financed from a separate capital budget while so far as possible the regular budget should be kept in balance. He suggested that full employment might be maintained by redistribution of income. If wealth was more equitably dispersed in the population, effective demand would be stimulated and would thus help capital growth. As the scarcity of capital diminished, investors would be rewarded less. He never believed that state planning would eliminate economic instability. He saw national economies as inherently wobbling: they were susceptible to rational management, but with irrational elements.73”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“Our final task’, he wrote, ‘might be to select those variables which can be deliberately controlled or managed by central authority in the kind of system in which we actually live.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“The central argument, which seemed revolutionary to classical economists, was that the economy had no natural tendency towards full employment.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“The Means to Prosperity articles had momentous impact – not only because the pleasure felt in understanding subtle arguments predisposes people towards accepting their conclusions. The articles sparked international discussions which inaugurated the oncoming Keynesian Revolution.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“He was wary of zealots who embraced good causes only to turn other people against them.61”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“It is not the miser who gets rich; but he who lays out his money in fruitful investments.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“it was impossible to convey the complexities of an economic reform programme when voters only understood war-cries or catchphrases. He was more effective at talking sense into people, and in improving their comprehension,”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“The real struggle today, just as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is between that 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, and disbelieving its actual existence.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“He detested the inefficiency of unregulated capitalism only less than he dreaded the waste and suffering of a proletarian revolution,’ wrote Kingsley Martin, who edited the New Statesman when Keynes was chairman of its publishing company: ‘he therefore made it his life’s work to save capitalism by altering its nature.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“In the Labour party, ‘too much will always be decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about’ – and who were complacent about their ignorance. ‘The Labour Party will always be flanked by the Party of Catastrophe – Jacobins, Communists, Bolshevists … This is the party which hates or despises existing institutions and believes that great good will result merely from overthrowing them – or at least to overthrow them is the necessary preliminary to any great good.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

“In it he shifted from classical orthodoxy by denying the short-term efficacy of the quantity theory of money, while accepting its truth ‘in the long run in which 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.’15”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes