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.
BERNARD CRICKQuite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
More Bernard Crick Quotes
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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.
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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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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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BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.
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Politics has rough manners, but it is a very useful thing.
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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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Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.
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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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There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.
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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.
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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.
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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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The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.
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The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.
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Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
BERNARD CRICK