John Maynard Keynes Quotes

This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.

In the nineties, everybody wants to talk about their rights and privileges. Twenty-five years ago, people talked about their obligations and responsibilities.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

The real problem in Mississippi is almost a complete moral breakdown. In order to move Mississippi from the bottom to the top, all we have to do is just get people to do a little more what they know, to practice a little more of what they preach.

A song's lyrics can't be held culprit for the overall change in society.

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one.

I think we live in a period of profound transformation. Very similar to when we had a transition from agricultural societies to industrial societies.

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse.

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished.

Our civilization is shifting from science and technology to rhetoric and litigation.

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.

The real cultural war is between the culture of narcissism and what might be called the culture of renewal.

If you change the society and a culture, the politics will follow.

The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself.

I think perhaps we manage our revolutions much more quietly in this country.

The United States is at a turning point because of a decreasing influence of faith .

Spin-off technologies are changing the culture. Even if you don't become an engineer you could be a poet, a journalist, a lawyer, but you will be thinking innovation and your actions within society, who you vote for, what you value, all become a participant in an innovation economy.

When politics is too slow, change has to come from culture.

Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.

Tallulah [Bankhead] was the foremost naughty girl of her era but, in those days, "naughty" meant piquant, whereas values have so changed that now, in the 1970s, it generally means nauseating.

Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.