# Quote — John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace

> 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.

- Author: [John Maynard Keynes](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-maynard-keynes.md)
- Book: [The Economic Consequences of the Peace](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-maynard-keynes/the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace.md)
- Page: 56
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace_(1919)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-maynard-keynes/the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace/the-future-life

## More from this book

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

p. 250 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-maynard-keynes/the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace/economic-privation-proceeds.md)

> 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.

p. 21 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-maynard-keynes/the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace/in-writing-thus.md)

> 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.

p. 77 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-maynard-keynes/the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace/the-division-of-the.md)