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 Man who works for others, without any selfish motive, really does good to himself.
I hope I'm worthy in my dying. I hope I can maintain myself - that I wouldn't become pathetic and needy, and the worst part of myself come out in adversity. But I'm not afraid of it. It'd be such a silly thing to do! To ruin the life you have by fearing its ending.
One unconsciously takes it for granted that doer and sufferer think and feel alike, and according to this supposition we measure the guilt of the one by the pain of the other.
Hold fast then to this sound and wholesome rule of life; indulge the body only as far as is needful for health.
Would you take a billion dollars, if as part of the deal the Earth were made uninhabitable a year after your death? ... well, of course not; you care about your friends, above all your children, any grandchildren. But ... what if the deal calls for the planet to be poisoned a thousand years later? We feel strong obligations to generations in the near future - should we not feel the same way about our children's great-grandchildren and generations beyond them?
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
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