Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.

In the western world today everyone is a democrat.

If I had to choose one which best characterized the condition of being a political leader in Athens, the word would be "tension".

A genuinely political society, in which discussion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks.

It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole.

What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.