488 Quotes About Political-philosophy

Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse—I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option—as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.

The greater good has been replaced by the lesser evil.

An oppressor mob is far more dangerous than an oppressor tyrant.

A republic whose representatives would use their powers to create laws and executive orders for the good of the people but violate these bodies of rules and governance is neither a republic nor good, and despotic in practice.

A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt.

A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party programme--whose highest real claim is to reasonable prudence--a sort of assent which we should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication.

All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.

I think the challenge to people’s independence in America is not that we have forgotten the meaning of freedom, but that we need to relearn the principles of liberty; the right to responsibly think, do, speak, and worship without interference and control by government.

So they used to choose their ruler for his character. Hence peoples were supremely fortunate when among them a man could never be more powerful than others unless he was a better man than they were. For there is nothing dangerous in a man‟s having as much power as he likes if he takes the view that he has power to do only what it is his duty to do.