Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
Interpretation
The quote critiques how people often focus on public perception rather than their own understanding or beliefs.
John Maynard Keynes highlights a tendency among Americans to prioritize the commonly held beliefs about what the average opinion is, rather than forming their own opinions or understanding. This reflects societal pressure to conform to perceived norms and opinions, suggesting a deeper commentary on the nature of public discourse and individual thought in a democratic society.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of independent thinking, this quote can illustrate the dangers of simply following the crowd.
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.
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we've become people like Woody Allen - thinkers and talkers and drafters of law.
[Slavery] is a weed that grows in every soil.
Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.
Australia's treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the thing on which the world will judge Australia and Australians - Not just now, but in the greater perspective of history.
We haven't yet got eyes that can gaze into all the splendour that God has created, but we shall get them one day; and that will be the finest fairy tale of all, for we shall be in it ourselves.
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