Creativity Quote by Michael Nesmith

Nesmith’s line reads like a calm rebuttal to the modern addiction to doom. Not a naïve “people are basically good” bumper sticker, but a working musician’s worldview: you spend decades on the road, in studios, in contracts, in the churn of fame and commerce, and you learn the difference between loud harm and quiet decency. Thieves and bad actors don’t have to be numerous to dominate the story; they just have to be disruptive, memorable, and structurally advantaged. News cycles and music-industry mythology both reward the spectacular villain, the cautionary tale, the scandal.

The specific intent feels like reassurance without sentimentality. “More honest” and “more good” aren’t claims of perfection; they’re a demographic argument. The subtext is statistical and moral at once: if you’re losing faith in people, it may be because attention is a rigged economy. Bad behavior is a flare; good behavior is infrastructure. You don’t notice the gig that goes smoothly, the stranger who doesn’t steal, the colleague who tells the truth, because nothing “happens.”

“It’s just always been that way” matters. Nesmith isn’t promising progress or preaching optimism. He’s rejecting the idea that we’ve entered some unprecedented age of corruption. Coming from a pop-era figure who watched mass media evolve from broadcast innocence to fragmented outrage, the line lands as a steadied voice: cynicism sells, but it’s not the whole inventory of human nature. The point isn’t that evil is rare; it’s that despair is often an error in counting.