Quotes by Political Theorists

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
Rosa Luxemburg
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
Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
Hannah Arendt
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
Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
Hannah Arendt
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary whatever the punishment once a specific crime has appeared for the first time its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
Hannah Arendt
Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
Hannah Arendt
Equality is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
Hannah Arendt
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
John Stuart Mill
The worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.
John Stuart Mill
Ideas as distinguished from events are never unprecedented.
Hannah Arendt
God helps those who help themselves.
Algernon Sidney
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
John Stuart Mill
Unquestionably it is possible to do without happiness it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
John Stuart Mill
Ask yourself whether you are happy and you will cease to be so.
John Stuart Mill
Love by its very nature is unworldly and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
Hannah Arendt
The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.
John Stuart Mill
He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
His eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding landscape.
John Stuart Mill
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Hannah Arendt
We will be victorious if we have not forgotten how to learn.
Rosa Luxemburg
I will believe in the right of one man to govern a nation despotically when I find a man born unto the world with boots and spurs and a nation with saddles on their backs.
Algernon Sidney
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
Hannah Arendt
Conscience is a sacred sanctuary where God alone may enter as judge.
Felicite Robert de Lamennais
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion and if we were sure stifling it would be an evil still.
John Stuart Mill
THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age.Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.
Hannah Arendt
If there are any persons who contest a received opinion,or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thankthem for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoicethat there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought,if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality ofour convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.
John Stuart Mill
No one but a fool, and only a fool of a peculiar description, feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his.
John Stuart Mill
In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
Hannah Arendt
The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.
Murray N. Rothbard
Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check.
Murray N. Rothbard
It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.
Russell Kirk
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.
John Stuart Mill
There is, therefore, a temptation to return to an explanation which automatically discharges the victim of responsibility: it seems quite adequate to a reality in which nothing strikes us more forcefully than the utter innocence of the individual caught in the horror machine and his utter inability to change his fate. Terror, however, is only in the last instance of its development a mere form of government. In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized. The point for the historian is that the Jews, before becoming the main victims of modern terror, were the center of Nazi ideology. And an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily.
Hannah Arendt
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.
Hannah Arendt
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
John Stuart Mill
My dear, it is very nice here, every day two or three persons are stabbed by soldiers in the city; there are daily arrests, but apart from these it is pretty gay..
Rosa Luxemburg
Socialism does not mean getting together in a parliament and passing laws, socialism means for us overthrowing the ruling classes with all the brutality [loud laughter] that the proletariat is capable of deploying in its struggle.
Rosa Luxemburg
Not content with the liberal creed of equality of rights, of equality before the law, the socialist State would trample on such equality on behalf of the monstrous and impossible goal of equality or uniformity of results--or rather, would erect a new privileged elite, a new class, in the name of bringing about such an impossible equality. Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the lbieral goals of freedom, peace and industrial harmony and growth--goals which can only be achieved through liberty and the seperation of government from virtuallty--by imposting the old conservative means of statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege.
Murray N. Rothbard
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
John Stuart Mill
It also appears to me that when prejudices persist obstinately, it is the fault of nobody so much as of those who make a point of proclaiming them insuperable, as an excuse to themselves for never joining in an attempt to remove them. Any prejudice whatever will be insurmountable if those who do not share it themselves truckle to it, and flatter it, and accept it as a law of nature.
John Stuart Mill
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
Hannah Arendt
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives... I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."John Stuart Mill ( British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68 )
John Stuart Mill
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.
Kenneth Minogue
One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over...
Murray N. Rothbard
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Hannah Arendt
It [the proletariat] should and must at once undertake socialist measures in the most energetic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words, exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique – dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest possible form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.
Rosa Luxemburg
A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor. This was the case in Nazi Germany when full terror was directed against Jews, i.e., against people with certain common characteristics which were independent of their specific behavior. In Soviet Russia the situation is more confused, but the facts, unfortunately, are only too obvious. On the one hand, the Bolshevik system, unlike the Nazis, never admitted theoretically that it could practice terror against innocent people, and though in view of certain practices this may look like hypocrisy, it makes quite a difference. Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more "advanced" than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror—namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.
Hannah Arendt
During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration.
Rosa Luxemburg
All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct.
John Stuart Mill
Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.
John Stuart Mill
No action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen.
Murray N. Rothbard
To be moral, an act must be free.
Murray N. Rothbard
Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.
John Stuart Mill
They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them.
John Stuart Mill
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
Hannah Arendt
Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which can happen in many other situations), but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom—a fight possible under tyranny, and even under the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any conditions of concentration-camp life). Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were "born" free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature. Yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society—more than the abstract nakedness of beig human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.
Hannah Arendt
I learn life from the poets.
Germaine de Staël
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
Hannah Arendt