Bernard Crick Quotes

Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.

The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.

Politics are, as it were, the market place and the price mechanism of all social demands - though there is no guarantee that a just price will be struck; and there is nothing spontaneous about politics- it depends on deliberate and continuous activity.

Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.

One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from the 'inner contradictions' of such a system.

What matters in Politics is what men actually do - sincerity is no excuse for acting unpolitically, and insincerity may be channelled by politics into good results.

Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupation of free men, and its existence is a test of freedom. The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.

The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.

The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.

Since the business of politics is the conciliation of differing interests, justice must not merely be done, but to be seen to be done.

The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself.

In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of 'reason' as single sources of authority.

Free men stick their necks out.

The political process is not tied to any particular doctrine. Genuine political doctrines, rather, are the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to this perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation.

The method of rule of the tyrant and the oligarch is quite simply to clobber, coerce, or overawe all or most other groups in the interest of their own.

Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.

Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.

A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.

Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence...politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.

The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.

The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.

If, of course, one builds into the concept of an 'individual' all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laisser-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance.

Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.

If a government is to do great new things, it will need more support. If a government is to change the world, it will need mass support. This is one of the discoveries of modern government.

Where government is impossible, politics is impossible.

Politics is too often regarded as a poor relation, inherently dependent and subsidiary; it is rarely praised as something with a life and character of its own.

BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.

There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.

To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.

Politics has rough manners, but it is a very useful thing.

Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.