The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.
BERNARD CRICKThe praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.
More Bernard Crick Quotes
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Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.
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Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.
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Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.
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The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.
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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.
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Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.
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In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of ‘reason’ as single sources of authority.
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The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself.
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Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence…politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.
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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.
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Since the business of politics is the conciliation of differing interests, justice must not merely be done, but to be seen to be done.
BERNARD CRICK