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.

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.

We must consider not only why the classical theory of democracy appears to be in contradiction with the observed practice, but also why the many different responses to this observation, though mutually incompatible, all share the belief that democracy is the best form of political organization.

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

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.

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