Home › Authors › Bernard Crick
Bernard Crick Quotes
d. 2008 England
Sir Bernard Rowland Crick (16 December 1929 – 19 December 2008) was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views were often summarised as "politics is ethics done in public". He sought to arrive at a "politics of action", as opposed to a "politics of thought" or of ideology.
England Political scientists Random Bernard Crick quote
25 quotes
The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.
Politics has rough manners, but it is a very useful thing.
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.
Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.
Since the business of politics is the conciliation of differing interests, justice must not merely be done, but to be seen to be done.
BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.
Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.
To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.
The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.
The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.
Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.
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.
Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.
Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.
Where government is impossible, politics is impossible.
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.
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.
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.
Topics Bernard Crick is quoted on