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.
But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another's - not the Shadow's. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it!
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
The Conqueror is always a lover of peace: he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.
Pride breakfasted with plenty, dined with poverty, and supped with infamy.
The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.
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