Bernard Crick Quotes
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.
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.
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.
Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
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.
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.
Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.
Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence...politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.
To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.
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.
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.
Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.
The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.
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.
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.
