Daily Inspiration Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes is doing something sly here: he flatters the reader’s sense of realism while quietly arguing that “realism” is often a comforting lie. “Vested interests” are the usual villain in political storytelling - greedy groups, captured institutions, backroom deals. Keynes doesn’t deny they matter; he demotes them. The truly volatile force, he insists, is the idea: the frame that tells a society what counts as common sense, what policies feel “natural,” what sacrifices seem moral, what outcomes look inevitable.

The line’s balance is its trapdoor. “Dangerous for good or evil” refuses the sentimental version of enlightenment where ideas only liberate. Keynes had watched the early 20th century prove the opposite: mass ideologies mobilizing states, turning economics into destiny, giving cruelty a theory and courage a blueprint. In that world, interests can be bargained with; ideas recruit believers.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in an era of depression, revolution, and the rise of authoritarian planning, Keynes was also fighting a more genteel dogma: the idea that markets self-correct and governments should stand aside. That doctrine wasn’t merely an “interest” dressed up as principle; it was a professional worldview that trained officials to accept unemployment as weather.

The subtext is a warning to both technocrats and radicals. Policy isn’t just the management of incentives; it’s the management of imagination. If you want to change what governments do, you have to change what they think is possible. And if you’re careless, the same mechanism that makes reform achievable can make catastrophe feel righteous.