Quotes from Donald Sassoon

Most businessmen are not, contrary to popular belief, 'natural' liberals. Their inclination is towards order and peace. They tend to be anxious and feel vulnerable, understandably so since they seldom know what is going to happen next.

In the absence of a plan for the elimination of the capitalist economy, the financial requirements for sodal reforms had to be provided by the capitalist economy itself. Socialist parties faced an unavoidable paradox: in order to pay for social welfare, it was imperative that the market be made as efficient as possible; to follow 'socialist' policies, it was essential to be pro-capitalist.

Far from favouring 'small government', the Victorians systematically intervened in all areas of public and private life, and not just in those such as morality that the term 'Victorian values' suggests. The extent of Victorian social legislation was impressive

The paradox is that the regional association we call today the European Union, which has few of the attributes of a state, is the strongest and closest inter-state association in the world, but it is located in the continent with the greatest degree of political fragmentation.

Books, after all, do not have the same impact whenever we read them.

To cement the unity of the nation, Romania did what many new nations do (and go on doing): she expanded the public sector, thus creating jobs for the scions of the 'native' middle classes and of the lower nobility. The result was an elephantine bureaucracy, open to corruption and bribery,

Liberals thought that it was possible to modernize agriculture, improve the peasants' standard of living, diversify the economy, and become a 'civilized' state. The conservatives were convinced that Romania was destined to remain an agrarian country for the foreseeable future.

This was also their wish. Their ideal was a situation in which Romania would export wheat, thus providing enough wealth for its upper class to live it up in Western style; the peasantry could be kept docile by being fed with m?m?lig?