Politics: A Very Short Introduction
Kenneth Minogue
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Their [realists'] concern is that utopian aspirations towards a new peaceful world order will simply absolutize conflicts and make them more intractable. National interests are in some degree negotiable; rights, in principle, are not. International organizations such as the United Nations have not been conspicuously successful in bringing peace, and it is likely that the states of the world would become extremely nervous of any move to give the UN the overwhelming power needed to do this.”
“It is said that the price of freedom is vigilance, and an important form of vigilance is attention to political rhetoric, which often reveals how things are going.”
“Politics is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not life itself.”
“Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.”
“Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes little.”
“At the turn of the twentieth century, the first wave of academic political scientists attacked some of their theoretical predecessors for the supposed mistake of assuming that human beings were entirely rational. This mistake had allegedly been made by politicians and theorists who had tried to appeal to voters in terms of purely rational argument. The new political scientists triumphantly pointed out that image, stereotype, the emotions arising in crowds, family background, and many other irrational factors were actually the main determinants of political behaviour.”
“As Hobbes remarked, in war, force and fraud are the cardinal virtues, and he regarded international relations as always potentially a condition of war. Cavour, one of the creators of a united Italy in the nineteenth century, is reported as remarking: ‘What scoundrels we would be if we had done for ourselves what we have done for our country.”
“What is merely desired has no intellectual force, whereas what is desirable moves the argument on to an objective plane beyond desire.”
“The secret of politics is to care about success, but not too much.”
“Science turns whatever it studies into a natural process which is not affected by thinking, because thought is the capacity to construe the world in a variety of ways, and how human beings act depends on these unpredictable constructions. Human conduct thus lacks even the regularity found in the natural world.”
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Book Keywords:
society, fascism, communism, poverty, history, politics, europe, despotism
