There is nothing an official hates more than a person who makes up his own mind. - Theodore Dalrymple

Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism.

It is surely almost self-evident that the strongest political emotions are negative: for example, the rich are hated much more than the poor are loved.

When a population feels alienated from the legal system under which it lives, because that system fails to protect it from real dangers while lending succor and encouragement to every possible kind of wrongdoing, the population may well lose faith in the very idea of law. That is how civilization unravels.