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

The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Where government is impossible, politics is impossible.

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 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.

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

Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.

Free men stick their necks out.

No, I slept as I always do when I am bored and have not the courage to amuse myself, or when I am hungry and have not the desire to eat.

Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and shambles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement.

My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

I hate being in boring fights. It frustrates me.

Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

I mean, it saves you from ultimately from the boredom of having one point of view, like being locked in a room with nothing but your own point of view, your own references.

What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?