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.
Interpretation
Excessive population growth can challenge traditional norms more than political ideologies or mistakes made by rulers.
In this quote, John Maynard Keynes suggests that the rapid growth of a nation's population can disrupt established conventions and societal norms, possibly more so than the influence of radical ideas or the failures of authoritarian governance. This implies that demographic changes can lead to significant societal transformation, emphasizing the potency of human growth in shaping culture and societal structures.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion on population control and its societal impacts.
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.
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.
If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.
The Tao which you know is not the eternal Tao
Never judge a philosophy by its abuse.
Loneliness, when accepted, becomes a gift that will lead us to find a purpose in life.
How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?
The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in 'renouncing' one's own self, by which I mean making up one's mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being 'happy' or 'unhappy' in the usual meaning of the words.
I think that people in general, whether they are male or female, who are inhibited by the clichés of what women are or what men are, really don't like themselves. Because personality traits are not necessarily sexual.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.