Best 5 quotes of Gaetano Mosca on MyQuotes

If tolerance is taken to the point where it tolerates the destruction of those same principles that made tolerance possible in the first place, it becomes intolerable.

We owe to democracy, at least in part, the regime of discussion with which we live; we owe it to the principal modern liberties: those of thought, press and association. And the regime of free discussion is the only one which permits the ruling class to renew itself... which eliminates that class quasi-automatically when it no longer corresponds to the interests of the country.

The mingling of good and evil is so inborn in human nature that a certain amount of fine metal must be present in the alloys of which criminal gangs, secret societies and murderous sects are compounded; and a little of the base metal must enter into the complex of sentiments that inspires companies of heroes and ascetic communities that make a fetish of self-sacrifice.

There is almost always some one political force, furthermore, that manifests an invincible tendency to overreach or absorb the others, and so to destroy a juridical equilibrium that has gradually been established. That is true both of political forces of a material characters, such as wealth and military power, and of forces of moral character, such as the great currents of religion or thought. Each of such current claims to monopolize truth and justice, and all types of exclusivity and bigotry, whether Christian or Mohammedan, whether sacred or rationalistic, whether inspired by the infallibility of the pope or by the infallibility of democracy, are equally pernicious from this point of view. Every country, every epoch, has its own peculiar current of ideas and beliefs, which being the strongest current, bears down upon the political mechanism and tends to subvert it. Quite generally the harm that has been done by weakening currents, which are going, or have gone, out of fashion, is appreciated very well, and the deep wounds that they have inflicted on the sens of justice are stigmatized with horror, meanwhile the similar harm that the current in rising vogue has done, or is threatening to do, is not discerned or else condoned or, at the most, feebly viewed with alarm. Men cry aloud and proclaim liberty has been won, that the storm is over. Actually the storm has changed direction, or, if one may use the metaphor, merely changed shaped and color.

When a governing class can permit itself anything in the name of a sovereign who can do anything, it undergoes a real moral degeneration, the degeneration that is common to all men whose acts are exempt from the restraint that the opinion and the conscience of their fellows ordinarily impose. When responsibility in subordinates in the end is one with irresponsibility and omnipotence in the man or in the little group of men standing at the head of the official hierarchy as a whole - call that man czar or sultan, or that group a Committee of Public Safety - the vices that absolutism generates in its leaders are communicated downwards to the whole political structure. Anything may be ventured when one is interpreting the will, real or imaginary, of a person who thinks he cannot possibly see everything and who does not have free and disinterested consciences about him to control his passions and correct his mistakes.