Myrdal Quotes

#1. Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.

Alva Myrdal

#2. The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well-off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery almost without noticing them.

Gunnar Myrdal

#3. Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes.

Jan Myrdal

#4. The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination - or rather, to be more exact - of the northern hemisphere's towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization.

Alva Myrdal

#5. Marriage, home life, and children, ought to be enjoyed by men and women together. Nobody - and least of all the child - is served by the present tendency to put these things all on one side as 'Woman's World.

Alva Myrdal

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

Gunnar Myrdal

#7. The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.

Alva Myrdal

#8. More must be done in concrete terms in order to promote the cause of disarmament.

Alva Myrdal

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

Gunnar Myrdal

#10. The misconception that a victory can be worth its price, has in the nuclear age become a total illusion.

Alva Myrdal

#11. My personal philosophy of life is one of ethics.

Alva Myrdal

#12. The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing.

Alva Myrdal

#13. I personally believe that those who are leaders with political power over the world will be forced some day, sooner or later, to give way to common sense and the will of the people.

Alva Myrdal

#14. Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields.

Gunnar Myrdal

#15. War is murder. And the military preparations now being made for a potential major confrontation are aimed at collective murder. In a nuclear age the victims would be numbered by the millions. This naked truth must be faced.

Alva Myrdal

#16. Language, as we know, is full of illogicalities.

Gunnar Myrdal

#17. The short-term international capital market is shrunken and erratic, and cannot be relied upon to cushion the effects of tendencies to disequilibrium in the balance of payments.

Gunnar Myrdal

#18. I have always regarded global development as a struggle between the forces of good and evil. Not to be simplified as a struggle between Jesus and Satan, since I do not consider that the process is restricted to our own sphere of culture.

Alva Myrdal

#19. America has had gifted conservative statesmen and national leaders. But with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes.

Gunnar Myrdal

#20. So many social changes are as irreversible as the reaction when sodium is thrown into water.

Gunnar Myrdal

#21. It is of the greatest importance that people and governments in many more countries than ours should realize that it is more dangerous to have access to nuclear arms than not to possess them.

Alva Myrdal

#22. If they [women] are to be integrated more fully into our society than has been the case so far, changes in individual attitudes of both men and women, adjustments in the labor market, and action by public authorities, will all be necessary.

Alva Myrdal

#23. Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.

Gunnar Myrdal

#24. The smaller nations can in fact exercise greater influence on disarmament negotiations than they have hitherto done.

Alva Myrdal

#25. America is conservative in fundamental principles ... but the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical.

Gunnar Myrdal

#26. 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.

Gunnar Myrdal

#27. Our immediate striving must be aimed at preventing what, in the present situation, is the greatest threat to the very survival of mankind, the nuclear threat.

Alva Myrdal

#28. It is frightening that in recent years such an increase has occurred in acts of terrorism, which have even reached peaceful countries such as ours. And as a 'remedy', more and more security forces are established to protect the lives of individual men and women.

Alva Myrdal

#29. 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.

Gunnar Myrdal

#30. I agree with the many who consider freezing all sorts of weapons systems a first step in a realistic disarmament policy.

Alva Myrdal

#31. 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.

Gunnar Myrdal

#32. A great amount has been talked and written about what constitutes a sufficient balance and what really is meant by the concepts of 'balance' and 'deterrence'.

Alva Myrdal

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

Gunnar Myrdal

#34. There is apparently nowhere a workable majority in the representative assemblies for making the specific cuts in expenditure which could bring down the taxes, and in election after election the people vote into power representatives who are as unable as they are unwilling to do anything about it.

Gunnar Myrdal

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

Gunnar Myrdal

#36. Though it is fairly easy to describe what constitutes a bad home, there is no simple definition of a good one. Conformity with the traditional pattern certainly is no guarantee of the happiest results.

Alva Myrdal

#37. There is a cultural factor promoting violence which nowadays undoubtedly is highly effective is the mass media. And particularly everything that enters our minds through pictorial media.

Alva Myrdal

#38. In the United States, and to only slightly lesser degree in all the other rich and economically progressive Western countries, public debate has at all times been dominated by the adherents of a "free" economy.

Gunnar Myrdal

#39. All mankind is now learning that these nuclear weapons can only serve to destroy, never become beneficial.

Alva Myrdal

#40. 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.

Gunnar Myrdal

#41. I have, despite all disillusionment, never, never allowed myself to feel like giving up. This is my message today; it is not worthy of a human being to give up.

Alva Myrdal

#42. It Is in the Agricultural Sector That the Battle for Long- Term Economic Development Will Be Won or Lost.

Gunnar Myrdal

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

Gunnar Myrdal

#44. America is the one rich country with the biggest slums, the least democratic and least developed health system, and the most niggardly attitude against its old people.

Gunnar Myrdal

#45. In most circles, the idea of economic planning has been in disrepute most of the time and, particularly in America, has almost carried connotations of intellectual and moral perversion and even political subversion.

Gunnar Myrdal

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

Gunnar Myrdal

#47. Sometimes it looks as if, the better off they [nations] become, the bigger do they conceive the gap between what is actually their lot and what would be desirable, while in the poor countries large masses of people seem to be satisfied by merely surviving.

Gunnar Myrdal

#48. Where do these arms come from, these Saturday night specials that constitute the instrument of threats in bank robberies, or the hand grenades used by terrorists? How can their sales and their import be permitted?

Alva Myrdal

#49. It is natural for the ordinary American when he sees something wrong to feel not only that there should be a law against it but, also that an organization should be formed to combat it.

Gunnar Myrdal

#50. The economic and political roots of the conflicts are too strong for us to pretend to create a lasting state of harmonious understanding between men.

Alva Myrdal

#51. As a group, housewives to-day suffer more from social isolation and loss of purpose than any other social group, except, perhaps, the old.

Alva Myrdal

#52. Traveling is like falling in love, the world is made new.

Jan Myrdal

#53. Nobel was a genuine friend of peace. He even went so far as to believe that he had invented a tool of destruction, dynamite, which would make war so senseless that it would become impossible. He was wrong.

Alva Myrdal

#54. We can hope that men will understand that the interest of all are the same, that hope lies in cooperation. We can then perhaps keep PEACE.

Alva Myrdal

#55. If only the authorities could be made to realize that the forces leading them on in the armament race are just insane.

Alva Myrdal

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

Gunnar Myrdal

#57. The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.

Alva Myrdal

#58. First and foremost arms are tools in the service of rival nations, pointing at the possibility of a future war.

Alva Myrdal

#59. It's not worthy o human beings to give up.

Alva Myrdal

#60. 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.

Gunnar Myrdal

#61. War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.

Alva Myrdal

#62. There is a third dimension to traveling, the longing for what is beyond.

Jan Myrdal

#63. Social taboos are shy like virtue; once lost, there is no remedy

Gunnar Myrdal

#64. 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.

Gunnar Myrdal

#65. Planned parenthood in the social history of the Western countries is, indeed, a phenomenon instrin-sically related to those very changes in peoples attitudes which, on the political plane, have been causing the trend towards economic planning.

Gunnar Myrdal

#66. It does not just happen. It is disclosed by science that practically one-half of trained intellectual resources are being mobilized for murderous purposes.

Alva Myrdal

#67. People become less inhibited from wanting to change social and economic conditions in a radical fashion according to their own interests, and from being prepared to think of state intervention in ever wider spheres as possible and useful for this purpose.

Gunnar Myrdal