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.
Speaking of Self-realizatio n is a delusion. It is only because people have been under the delusion that the non-Self is the Self and the unreal the Real that they have to be weaned out of it by the other delusion called Self-realizatio n; because actually the Self always is the Self and there is no such thing as realizing it.
They whose guilt within their bosom lies, imagine every eye beholds their blame.
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I doβback to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.
To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it.
What was taken by force, can only be restored by force.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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