Bernard Crick Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Free men stick their necks out.

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

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

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

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.