He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a contrast between idealism and realism regarding one's view of a nation and its people.
John Maynard Keynes uses this quote to illustrate the duality of human perception. He points out that while one can hold an idealized view of a place, such as France, there can simultaneously exist a disillusionment with humanity as a whole, including the very people admired. It evokes the tension between romanticized beliefs about a culture and the stark realities of human nature.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about national pride and the realities of society during a cultural event.
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.
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
I think a culture of nonviolence will help create the condition where poverty is unacceptable, where racism is way behind us and not something that we have to deal with on a frequent basis, and where militarism and violence are reduced almost to be nonexistent.
If you don't want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying that you want a country based on Christian values. Because you don't!
We're left with so little to go on. Only the present is full enough to seem complete, and even that is an optical illusion. The moment is bleeding off the page. We live on the precipice of our perceptions. At the edge of every living instant, the world shears away like a cliff of ice into the sea of what is forgotten.
I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim.
The fact is that when you make the other suffer, he will try to find relief by making you suffer more. The result is an escalation of suffering on both sides.
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