Politics are, as it were, the market place and the price mechanism of all social demands - though there is no guarantee that a just price will be struck; and there is nothing spontaneous about politics- it depends on deliberate and continuous activity.

Bernard Crick

Categorized in : Political Demand Guarantees That

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.

Bernard Crick

revenge suffering past

Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.

Bernard Crick

affair democracy world

One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from the 'inner contradictions' of such a system.

Bernard Crick

real giving order

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.

Bernard Crick

what-matters acting men

Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupation of free men, and its existence is a test of freedom. The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

Bernard Crick

politics political men

The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself.

Bernard Crick

politics political together

The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.

Bernard Crick

unique character lying

Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.

Bernard Crick

factory-workers working-for-a-living factories

The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.

Bernard Crick

agony practice order

In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of 'reason' as single sources of authority.

Bernard Crick

real reason firsts

Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence...politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.

Bernard Crick

politics political evil

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.

Bernard Crick

method tyrants groups

Free men stick their necks out.

Bernard Crick

necks sticks men

Since the business of politics is the conciliation of differing interests, justice must not merely be done, but to be seen to be done.

Bernard Crick

interest done justice

Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.

Bernard Crick

technology simple ideas

The political process is not tied to any particular doctrine. Genuine political doctrines, rather, are the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to this perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation.

Bernard Crick

doctrine politics political

Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.

Bernard Crick

political challenges thinking

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

Bernard Crick

condescension-and praise men

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

Bernard Crick

rough useful-things manners

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

Bernard Crick

chaos men order