Bernard Crick Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Free men stick their necks out.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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