Bernard Crick Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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