“Have I really been in a battle?” wondered Stendhal’s hero after many hours blundering around the field of Waterloo, and many people today share a similar perplexity. Like Stendhal’s hero, they eat and drink and sustain the business of life,… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share Image
“An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share
“Their [realists'] concern is that utopian aspirations towards a new peaceful world order will simply absolutize conflicts and make them more intractable. National interests are in some degree negotiable; rights, in principle, are not. International organizations such as the United Nations have not been conspicuously successful in bringing peace, and it is likely that the states of the world would… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share
Politics is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not life itself. — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share Image
“From Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign ruling by authority to Max Weber 250 years later, defining the state in terms of a monopoly of force is a slow loss of civil sensitivity. The term “democracy” is strictly a constitutional belief about how authority is generated, but today it most commonly commends rather than names a government that serves some particular… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share
“Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes little.” — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share Image
“The story of liberalism, as liberals tell it, is rather like the legend of St. George and the dragon. After many centuries of hopelessness… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share Image
“My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate,… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share Image
If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share Image
“Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into responding to each new problem by… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share Image
Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox… — Kenneth Minogue Copy Share Image
