On Politics Quotes

“There was no politics in Persia because the great king was the master of slaves, not rulers of citizens. The point is beautifully made by Herodotus, the father of history and our own starting point. The exiled Spartan king, Demaratus, had taken refuge at the court of the great king of Persia, Darius I, in 491 BCE. Darius made him the ruler of Pergamum and some other cities. In 480 Darius's son and successor, Xerxes, took him to see the enormous army he had assembled to avenge his father's humiliation by the Athenians in an earlier attempt to conquer Greece. 'Surely,' he said to Demaratus, "the Greeks will not fight against such odds.' He was displeased when Demaratus assured him that they certainly would. 'How is it possible that a thousand men-- or ten thousand, or fifty thousand should stand up to an army as big as mine, especially if they were not under a single master but all perfectly free to do as they pleased?' He could understand that they might feign courage if they were whipped into battle as his Persian troops would be, but it was absurd to suppose that they would fight against such odds. Not a bit of it, said Demaratus. THey would fight and die to preserve their freedom. He added, 'They are free--yes--but they are not wholly free; for they have a master, and that master is Law, which they fear much more than your subjects fear you. Whatever this master commands they do; and his command never varies: it is never to retreat in battle, however great the odds, but always to remain in formation and to conquer or die.' They were Citizens, not subjects, and free men, not slaves; they were disciplined but self-disciplined. Free men were not whipped into battle.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“America posed a deeply interesting question to any Frenchmen with a political curiosity to ask it. How had Americans launched a revolution that aimed at establishing a free, stable, and constitutional government and made a success of it, while the French had in forty-one years lurched from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, to the declaration of the republic, to mob rule, the Terror, the mass murder, and thence to a conservative republic, Napoleonic autocracy, the Bourbon restoration, further revolution, and the installation of an Orleanist constitutional monarchy?”
― Alan James Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“It is never right to injure anyone. It can never be right to make someone worse than he is.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“There were two views of how a polis was formed. The first was military: a scattered group of people came to live in one city behind a set of protective walls. The other was political: a group of people agreed to live under one authority, with or whithout the protection of a walled city. Synoikismos, or 'Living together', embraces both. Any political entity implies a population that recognizes a common authority, but the first 'city-states' were not always based on a city. Sparta makes the point. We think of Sparta as a city, but the Spartans were proud of the fact that they lived in villages without protective walls: their army was their wall and 'every man a brick.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“The revolt in Asia Minor was snugged out in 494, and the Athenians realized that they had acquired a dangerous enemy. Darius I's first attempt at invasion in 492 was abortive: a huge storm wrecked his fleet. In 491 the Persians demanded 'earth and water' --signs of submission--from the Aegean islands and mainland cities. Many submitted. Athens and Sparta not only stood firm but murdered the Persian ambassadors. The Athenians put them on trial and killed both the ambassadors and their translator for offenses against the Greek language; the Spartans simply thew them down a well.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“Modern liberalism has many roots. One of the most important is the ideas of a man described by an American critic as 'his satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill' and revered by others.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“The revolutionaries failed to institute the novel forms of social and political organization they hankered after; Workers would not accept a ten-day week, or state-appointed priests, or rectangular departements, or the cult of the Supreme Being.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“It is not a defect of liberal democracies that they are less “pure” than ancient democracies. Pure democracies were prone to factionalism and inconstancy as assemblies were bamboozled by demagogues;”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics

“Extreme poverty would be hard to bear, but a miserable person is miserable however rich. A good character is our most important possession, rich or poor.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“In many cities, tyrants were able to seize power by offering to protect the poorer citizens against the rich or vice versa. “Tyrant” is a word with an unlovely ring to it, but did not inevitably imply that a ruler was brutal or self-seeking, only that he had acquired power unconstitutionally, and governed as a sole ruler.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

“Two plausible views have dominated purported explanations from that day to this. One relies on the thought that what we use requires human effort to make, catch, dig up, or find; the other relies instead on the fact that what we purchase reflects what we want.”
― Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present