Quotes from Kenneth Minogue

Their [realists'] concern is that utopian aspirations towards a new peaceful world order will simply absolutize conflicts and make them more intractable. National interests are in some degree negotiable; rights, in principle, are not. International organizations such as the United Nations have not been conspicuously successful in bringing peace, and it is likely that the states of the world would become extremely nervous of any move to give the UN the overwhelming power needed to do this.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

As Hobbes remarked, in war, force and fraud are the cardinal virtues, and he regarded international relations as always potentially a condition of war. Cavour, one of the creators of a united Italy in the nineteenth century, is reported as remarking: 'What scoundrels we would be if we had done for ourselves what we have done for our country.

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.

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.

The search for liberation is a rejection of the responsibilities of freedom in favour of a release into the irresponsibility of rights.

Science turns whatever it studies into a natural process which is not affected by thinking, because thought is the capacity to construe the world in a variety of ways, and how human beings act depends on these unpredictable constructions. Human conduct thus lacks even the regularity found in the natural world.

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.

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

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

A reactionary is someone with a clear and comprehensive vision of an ideal world we have lost.

In our time', Thomas Mann remarked, 'the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.