BERNARD CRICK

The fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited

Since the business of politics is the conciliation of differing interests, justice must not merely be done, but to be seen to be done.

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

A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.

Political activity is a type of moral activity. It does not claim to settle every problem or to make every sad heart glad, but it can help some way in nearly everything and, where it is strong, it can prevent the vast cruelties and deceits of ideological rule.

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.

The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.

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

The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.

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.

If, of course, one builds into the concept of an 'individual' all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom, 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.

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

Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.

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

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.

Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.

Politics has rough manners, but it is a very useful thing.

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

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.

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

Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence...politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.

Free men stick their necks out.

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

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.