Best 30 quotes of Bernard Crick on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Man's inclination to justice makes democracy possible; but man's capacity for injustice makes it necessary.' The optimism we need to prevent ourselves from destroying our own democratic freedoms and, indeed, our own human habitat must be based on reasoned pessimism.

Monarchy is like a splendid ship, with all sails set it moves majestically on, but then it hits a rock and sinks for ever. Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks but, damn it, your feet are always in the water. That is a good metaphor, for raft, he implies, is simply swept along by the tide or the current; one can with a paddle or a plank steer a little to stay afloat, trim forward direction slightly to left or right, perhaps even slow down or speed up a little, but there is no turning back against the current of democracy.

Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless).