Top 35 Bernard Crick Quotes
#1. 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.
Bernard Crick
#2. In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of 'reason' as single sources of authority.
Bernard Crick
#3. 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.
Bernard Crick
#4. 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.
Bernard Crick
#5. Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.
Bernard Crick
#6. 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.
Bernard Crick
#7. 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.
Bernard Crick
#8. Politics has rough manners, but it is a very useful thing.
Bernard Crick
#9. There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.
Bernard Crick
#10. Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless).
Bernard Crick
#11. Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
Bernard Crick
#12. 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.
Bernard Crick
#13. Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.
Bernard Crick
#14. The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.
Bernard Crick
#15. Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.
Bernard Crick
#16. Democracy: stored up in heaven; but unhappily has not yet been communicated to us.
Bernard Crick
#17. Man's inclination to justice makes democracy possible; but man's capacity for injustice makes it necessary.' The optimism we need to prevent ourselves from destroying our own democratic freedoms and, indeed, our own human habitat must be based on reasoned pessimism.
Bernard Crick
#18. BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.
Bernard Crick
#19. Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.
Bernard Crick
#21. Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence ... politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.
Bernard Crick
#22. Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.
Bernard Crick
#23. The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.
Bernard Crick
#24. The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.
Bernard Crick
#25. Where government is impossible, politics is impossible.
Bernard Crick
#26. The populist mode of democracy is a politics of arousal more than of reason, but also a politics of diversion from serious concerns that need settling in either a liberal democratic or a civic republican manner.
Bernard Crick
#27. 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
#28. Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupations of free men, and its existences is a test of freedom.
Bernard Crick
#29. The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.
Bernard Crick
#30. 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.
Bernard Crick
#31. 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.
Bernard Crick
#32. To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.
Bernard Crick
#33. The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself.
Bernard Crick
#34. 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 Crick
#35. The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.
Bernard Crick
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