12 Quotes by Alan Ryan

...this is a book about texts as well as their authors, it is not a textbook so much as a context book and a pretext book, concerned with settings and motives as well as the works themselves. Its success will be measured by the readers who pick up Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and find themselves engrossed rather than baffled—and even when they are baffled, are happy to go on reading, interrogating, and arguing with their authors for themselves.

A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

It is never right to injure anyone. It can never be right to make someone worse than he is.

The revolutionaries failed to institute the novel forms of social and political organization they hankered after; Workers would not accept a ten-day week, or state-appointed priests, or rectangular departements, or the cult of the Supreme Being.

Modern liberalism has many roots. One of the most important is the ideas of a man described by an American critic as 'his satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill' and revered by others.

We do not go to work only to earn an income, but to find meaning in our lives. What we do is a large part of what we are.

Modern liberalism has many roots. One of the most important is the ideas of a man described by an American critic as ‘his satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill’ and revered by others.

A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill’s essay On Liberty, or Hobbes’s Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

Justice is the most “political” or institutional of the virtues. The legitimacy of a state rests upon its claim to do justice.