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

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.

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

Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment.

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.

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.