Political Philosophy Questions

"Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all

"Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."

· "I have spoken as though the political realm were no more than a battlefield of partial,conflicting interests, where nothing counted but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust for dominion...[but] from this perspective, we remain unaware of the actual content of political life - of the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new. However, what I meant to show here is that this whole sphere, its greatness notwithstanding, is limited - that it does not encompass the whole of man's and the world's existence

"I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run."

What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

· The telling of factual truth comprehends much more than the daily information supplied by journalists, though without them we should never find our bearings in an ever-changing world and, in the most literal sense, would never know where we are...this very important political function of supplying information is exercised from outside the political realm, strictly speaking; no action and no decision are, or should be, involved"

· the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world...is being destroyed

· "The modern political lie deals efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to practically everybody. This is obvious in the case of rewriting contemporary history under the eyes of those who witnessed it, but it is equally true in image-making of all sorts, in which, again, every known and established fact can be denied or neglected if it is likely to hurt the image"

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

· Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us

· There is a decisive difference between Hobbes' mathematical axiom and the true standard for human conduct that Plato's philosopher is supposed to bring back from his journey into the sky of ideas, although Plato, who believed that mathematical truth opened the eyes of the mind to all truths, was not aware of it.

· Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul. History, then, is a record of an interruption of the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history.

· When our Princes fought among themselves, they sought the assistance of Company Bahadur. That co-operation was versed alike in commerce and war. It was unhampered by questions of morality. Its object was to increase its commerce and to take money. The Hindus and the Mohammedans were at daggers drawn. This, too, gave the Company its opportunity and thus we created the circumstances that gave the Company its control over India. They wish to convert the whole world into a vast market for their goods. They will leave no stone unturned to reach the goal.

· If the past and present are treated as parts of the future - that is, changed back into their former state of potentiality - the political realm is deprived not only of its main stabilizing force but of the starting point from which to change, to begin something new

· Man's reason, being fallible, can function only if he can make 'public use' of it, and this is equally true for those who, still in a state of "tutelage," are unable to use their minds 'without the guidance of somebody else' and for the 'scholar', who needs 'the entire reading public' to examine and control his results"

· He takes advantage of the undeniable affinity of our capacity for action, for changing reality, with this mysterious faculty of ours that enables us to say, 'The sun is shining,'when it is raining cats and dogs. If we were as thoroughly conditioned in our behaviour as some philosophies have wished us to be, we would never be able to accomplish this little miracle. In other words, our ability to lie-but not necessarily our ability to tell the truth-belongs among the few obvious, demonstrable data that confirm human freedom"

· Liberties in the sense of civil rights are the results of liberation, but they are by no means the actual content of freedom, whose essence is admission to the public realm and participation in public affairs."

· The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love.

· Factual truth, on the contrary, is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature. Facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm