Alan Ryan Quotes

We do not go to work only to earn an income, but to find meaning in our lives. What we do is a large part of what we are

Justice is the most "political" or institutional of the virtues. The legitimacy of a state rests upon its claim to do justice.

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.

It is never right to injure anyone. It can never be right to make someone worse than he is.

Richard A. Posner is an extraordinary person. If he did not exist, it would be hard to believe that he could. (...) He writes with a flair that puts most journalists to shame and a depth of knowledge that puts most professors to shame.

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.