Kenneth Minogue Quotes

#1. The secret of politics is to care about success, but not too much.

Kenneth Minogue

#2. However ignorant a person may be, he or she can always moralize. And it is the propensity to moralize that takes up most of the space for public discussion in contemporary democracy.

Kenneth Minogue

#3. It is said that the price of freedom is vigilance, and an important form of vigilance is attention to political rhetoric, which often reveals how things are going.

Kenneth Minogue

#4. The search for liberation is a rejection of the responsibilities of freedom in favor of a release into the irresponsibility of rights. And a right is irresponsible because it is a legally entrenched liberty that does not contain within itself the limitations instinctive in a free society.

Kenneth Minogue

#5. Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.

Kenneth Minogue

#6. Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call 'the mandate of heaven', but life for the peasant changes little.

Kenneth Minogue

#7. Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.

Kenneth Minogue

#8. Politics is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not life itself.

Kenneth Minogue

#9. The ideal of toleration sounds like a formal condition allowing all flowers to bloom, but it turns out on examination to adumbrate a determinate form of life no less intrusive than the Sharia or "fundamentalist" Christianity.

Kenneth Minogue

#10. Freedom must mean that institutions have the autonomy to determine their own practices and admirations within the law. Otherwise, we confront the totalitarian demand that everyone should think the same thing and participate in the same admirations.

Kenneth Minogue

#11. What is merely desired has no intellectual force, whereas what is desirable moves the argument on to an objective plane beyond desire.

Kenneth Minogue

#12. In a world in which the personal is widely believed to be the political, the sheep of toleration soon turns into the wolf that demands acceptance, indeed, admiration.

Kenneth Minogue