Top 30 Bernard Crick Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Bernard Crick

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

— Bernard Crick

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

— Bernard Crick

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

— Bernard Crick

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

— Bernard Crick

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Bernard Crick

9. “Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.”

— Bernard Crick

10. “Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupations of free men, and its existences is a test of freedom.”

— Bernard Crick

11. “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

12. “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.”

— Bernard Crick

13. “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

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

— Bernard Crick

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Bernard Crick

18. “Democracy: stored up in heaven; but unhappily has not yet been communicated to us.”

— Bernard Crick

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

— Bernard Crick

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

— Bernard Crick

21. “Free men stick their necks out.”

— Bernard Crick

22. “To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.”

— Bernard Crick

23. “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

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

— Bernard Crick

25. “Where government is impossible, politics is impossible.”

— Bernard Crick

26. “The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.”

— Bernard Crick

27. “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.”

— Bernard Crick

28. “The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.”

— Bernard Crick

29. “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

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

— Bernard Crick

31. “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.”

— Bernard Crick

32. “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.”

— Bernard Crick

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

— Bernard Crick

34. “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