It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.
Interpretation
It is preferable for a person to exercise control over their finances rather than to oppress others.
John Maynard Keynes emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility in finance rather than exerting power and control over other people. In essence, he advocates for individuals to focus on managing their own economic resources rather than using their status or wealth to dominate or intimidate others in society.
In practice
During a discussion about financial ethics, one might quote Keynes to highlight the importance of self-discipline in wealth management.
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
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.
We will not have any more crashes in our time.
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.
The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show.
People want economy, and they'll pay any price to get it.
With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.
We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.
Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.
Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.
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