Bernard Crick (1929 – 2008)
British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views were often summarised as "politics is ethics done in public".
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.
Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.
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.
The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.
The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.
The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.
Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.
Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.
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.
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.
The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.
To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.
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.
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.
There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.
In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of 'reason' as single sources of authority.
Where government is impossible, politics is impossible.
Free men stick their necks out.
Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.
Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.