In the western world today everyone is a democrat.

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.

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.

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

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.

Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment.

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