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Bernard Crick Quotes (1929-2008)
About Bernard Crick
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.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Bernard Crick quotes.
“Where government is impossible, politics is impossible.”
“BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.”
“The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.”
“Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.”
“Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.”
“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.”
“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. ”
“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 attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.”
“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.”
“Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.”
“If a government is to do great new things, it will need more support. If a government is to change the world, it will need mass support. This is one of the discoveries of modern government.”
“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.”
“If, of course, one builds into the concept of an 'individual' all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laisser-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance.”
Bernard Crick Quotes by Topic
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Bernard Crick on Relevance
“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.”
What Bernard Crick Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Bernard Crick shared regarding contemporaries.
Bernard Crick on British people
“To be British seems to us to mean that we respect the laws, the elected parliamentary and democratic political structures, traditional values of mutual tolerance, respect for equal rights and mutual concern; that we give our allegiance to the state (as commonly symbolised by the Crown) in return for its protection.”
About Bernard Crick
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.