Quotes from Gunnar Myrdal

In society, liberty for one may mean the suppression of liberty for others.

Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by Governments lacking courage and vision.

All sudden and violent changes, whatever their causes or character, must tend to decrease the respect for status quo as a natural order of things.

Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic.

Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.

I am often considered almost not a part of the profession of Establishment economists. I am even referred to as a sociologist. And by that, economists usually do not mean anything flattering.

In my family, we don't die till we're 100 years old.

The ordinary American is the opposite of a cynic. He is on the average more of a believer and a defender of the faith in humanity than the rest of the Occidentals. It is a relatively important matter to him to be true to his own ideals and to carry them out in actual life.

People don't realize the great happiness there is in living to be very old and together all the time.

Toward the middle and end of the Fifties, West European countries became somewhat more important as providers of aid to underdeveloped countries. It was partly due to the prodding of the United States that these countries, as they regained economic viability, should shoulder their share of the aid burden.

The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes ... in drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes, we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture.

To the great majority of white Americans, the Negro problem has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is embarrassing. It makes for moral uneasiness.

The treatment of the Negro is America's greatest and most conspicuous scandal.

Cultural influences have set up the assumptions about the mind, the body, and the universe with which we begin; pose the questions we ask; influence the facts we seek; determine the interpretation we give these facts; and direct our reaction to these interpretations and conclusions.

America is free to choose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity.

I would say that it is an advantage to belong to a small country. We are apt to be less provincial in scholarly undertakings. We don't have enough literature in various problems - we must always look on the whole world. No country can be so provincial as a big country. The United States is, in my opinion, the most provincial country I have lived in - an I'm afraid that England and France don't come very far behind.

During the three decades of its existence, the effectiveness of the United Nations has, on the whole, tended to decrease, particularly in the field of peace and security and, more generally, all issues in which the developed countries feel they have important stakes.

The Negro problem, like all other political problems, is fundamentally a moral issue. This is realism, not idealism. Those of my colleagues who believe that they are particularly 'hard boiled' because they overlook the fact that human beings are struggling for their consciences are simply unrealistic.

It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism.

As a forecaster, Marx shared the common destiny of all prophets: to be belied by events.