Tim Minchin Quotes

I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.

Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.

It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching.

History is past politics, and politics present history.

The political biographies most popular in the modern era often tell us less about their subjects than about the moment in which the books themselves are published.

I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.

A small acquaintance with history shows that all governments are selfish and the French governments more selfish than most.

All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas — and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.

No man can be a politician except he be first a historian.

Eventually an effective political ideology cannot be based on any certain religion. Religion can offer some contribution, but an entire political activism cannot be oriented in accordance with religion. Political history of this region has the example of religion-based politics attempted in Pakistan and it failed. Not only in Islam, people in other religions of many regions try to keep on politics based on religion. It's not right.

The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms.

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art another.

Political thought never develops in a vacuum; it is always highly responsive to the force of political events, even as it shapes those events in crucial ways.

History is one of those things that politicians tend not to use.

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

Undoubtedly, one comes closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and nobles. But precisely because such an analysis of history comes closer to the truth, it is more dangerous. It gives the illusion of full knowledge; it supplies answers to all questions, answers which merely run around in a circle repeating a few formulas.

One of the things that is so important, critical I think, in reading not just the founders but thousands of years as you put it, that discussion about corruption, is that you can't talk about the problem of corruption without talking about human nature.

I'm not a political comic.

I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.

My political awakening, if I can be as grand as to call it that, was all about what was happening around me. It wasn't some romantic, patriotic vision of Scotland going back to what it had been 300 years previously.

A lot of people are surprised when I talk so much about the present, but politics is just a crucial part of archaeology.

I read a lot of history for fun.

With politics, everyone - your neighbour, acquaintances, anyone you ever meet - has an opinion. Particularly about what Arvind Kejriwal should be doing.