Quotes from Bernard Crick

Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.

BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.

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.

There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.

Politics has rough manners, but it is a very useful thing.

Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.

Boredom with established truths is a great enemy of free men.

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.

We each have to choose something but it is another question how and why we presume to choose for others.

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.

The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

my goals are extreme and therefore I moderate and measure my means.

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.

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).

The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

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.

Free men stick their necks out.