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.

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

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.

Political leaders, lacking documents that could be kept secret (apart from the occasional exception), lacking media they could control, were of necessity brought into a direct and immediate relationship with their constituents, and therefore under more and direct and immediate control.

man is by nature designed to live in the polis, the highest form of koinonia, community; that is man's end or goal if he achieves the full potentiality of his nature.

Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment.

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