Kenneth Minogue

“An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship…

— Kenneth Minogue

“Their [realists'] concern is that utopian aspirations towards a new peaceful world order will simply absolutize conflicts and make them more intractable.…

— Kenneth Minogue

Politics is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not life itself.

— Kenneth Minogue

“From Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign ruling by authority to Max Weber 250 years later, defining the state in terms of a…

— Kenneth Minogue

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.

— Kenneth Minogue

Capitalism is what people do if you leave them alone.

— Kenneth Minogue

“Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes…

— Kenneth Minogue

“The story of liberalism, as liberals tell it, is rather like the legend of St. George and the dragon. After many centuries…

— Kenneth Minogue

“My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to…

— Kenneth Minogue

If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure.…

— Kenneth Minogue

“Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into responding to each new…

— Kenneth Minogue

Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current…

— Kenneth Minogue

“Olympianism is the characteristic belief system of today’s secularist, and it has itself many of the features of a religion. For one…

— Kenneth Minogue

“To be conservative in politics is to take one’s bearings not from the latest bright idea about how to make a better…

— Kenneth Minogue

“The evident problem with democracy today is that the state is pre-empting—or “crowding out,” as the economists say—our moral judgments. Rulers are…

— Kenneth Minogue

“The failure of Communism was consecrated in the fall of the Soviet Union. The remarkable thing is that, as in most cases…

— Kenneth Minogue

“Have I really been in a battle?” wondered Stendhal’s hero after many hours blundering around the field of Waterloo, and many people…

— Kenneth Minogue

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did…

— Kenneth Minogue

“However ignorant a person may be, he or she can always moralize. And it is the propensity to moralize that takes up…

— Kenneth Minogue