Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of tria...l and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident--the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of de...ath, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kings are much to be pitied, who, misled by weak ministers, and deceived by wicked favourites, run into political errors, which in...volve their families in ruin: and it might prove some solace to his present majesty, when, fallen from the head of the greatest empire the world has seen, he shall again exhibit in the political system of Europe the original character of a petty king of Britain, could he impute his fall to error alone. Error is to be pitied and pardoned: it is the weakness of human nature. But vice is a foul blemish, not pardonable in any character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And then, Sir, there is this consideration, that if the abuse be enormous, Nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, ...overturn a corrupt political system.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration ...of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.... It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent... liberty and happiness of the United States.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the way--about Bolshevism: one has to remember that all that is published in the press is propaganda, that the Bolsheviki are t...he moderate social-revolutionaries, a political party, and the Soviets are a system of government based on the idea of "pure democracy" (Mso called in the textbooks on gov't) that every man shall take direct part in the government of the country--which is arrived at by industrial representation through the heirarchy of soviets, and that much the same system would be in vogue in America--(geographical instead of industrial units) if Hamilton and the rest had taken the New England town-meeting as the unit of government instead of importing Montesquieu's ideas. It's silly to idealize things in Russia, but it is criminal to condemn them unheard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to prod...uce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties a...re in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »