36 Quotes by Bernard Crick

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.

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.

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

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.

Free men stick their necks out.

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.