Human Nature in Politics quotes

If the world consisted of things which constantly and arbitrarily varied their appearance, if nothing was ever like anything else, or like itself for more than a moment at a time, living beings as at present constituted would not act at all.

They would drift like seaweed among the waves.

The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of the hawk, because one hawk is like another. Animals wake at sunrise, because one sunrise is like another; and find nuts or grass for food, because each nut and blade of grass is like the rest.

If he is a Frenchman, it may be the marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in the market-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the 'Marseillaise.'

Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff, Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes.

Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a funeral crowd after the fighting is over, and his heart may stir within him as he hears Pericles abstract from the million qualities of individual Athenians in the present and the past just those …

The party prepossessions and party expectations of his constituents alone make it possible for them to think and feel with him.

When he speaks there is between him and his audience the party mask, larger and less mobile than his own face, like the mask which enabled actors to be seen and heard in the vast open-air theatres of Greece.

If he can no longer act the part with sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in the mask of another party.

… condition of their task, the fact that if an individual statesman's intellectual career is to exist for the mass of the present public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent.

The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards politics is like a very slow photograph plate.

He who wishes to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for a long time. A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.

The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards politics is like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for a long time.

A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.

'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be wrong.

Any one who watches the working of his own mind will find that it is by no means easy to trace these sharp distinctions between various mental states, which seem so obvious when they are set out in little books on psychology.

The mind of man is like a harp, all of whose strings throb together; so that emotion, impulse, inference, and the special kind of inference called reasoning, are often simultaneous and intermingled aspects of a single mental experience.

This is especially true in moments of action and excitement; but when we are sitting in passive contemplation we would often find it hard to say whether our successive states of consciousness are best described as emotions or inferences.

Rousseau and his French followers rested these rights on a presumed social contract.

Human rights stood upon that contract as the elephant upon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like the tortoise, was apt to stand upon nothing at all.

At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of humour of mankind, swept aside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from natural right.

He learns also a few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after he has read a little of the history of institutions, his political education is complete.

It is no wonder that the average layman prefers old politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and young doctors who remember theirs.

[30]

… which inspired the men of 1848,'[33] and the book ends with a sketch of a proposed constitution in which the voters are to be required to vote for candidates known to them through declarations of policy 'from which all mention of party is rigorously excluded.'[34]

One seems to be reading a series of conscientious observations of the Copernican heavens by a loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy.

Professor Ostrogorski was a distinguished member of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the first Duma of Nicholas II., and must have learnt for himself that if he and his fellows were to get force enough behind them to contend on equal terms with the Russian …

'I am myself,' he says in the same Introduction, 'an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerable were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue sky he can.'[37]

Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical research who, finding that experiment did not bear out some traditional formula, should speak of himself as nevertheless 'grimly resolved' to see things from the old and comfortable point of view!

The next step in the course of political training which I am advocating would be the quantitative study of the inherited variations of individual men when compared with the 'normal' or 'average' man who had so far served for the study of the type.

and that he felt like the bewildered porter in Punch, who had to arrange the subleties of nature according to the unsubtle tariff-schedule of his company.

'Cats,' he quoted the porter as saying, 'is dogs, and guinea-pigs is dogs, but this 'ere tortoise is a hinsect.'

But it must constantly be remembered that quantitative thinking does not necessarily or even generally mean thinking in terms of numerical statistics.

… group of men, differing in origin, education, and mental type, first establish an approximate agreement as to the probable results of a series of possible political alternatives involving, say, increasing or decreasing state interference, and then discover the point where their 'liking' turns into 'disliking.'

Man is the measure of man, and he may still be using a quantitative process even though he chooses in each case that method of measurement which is least affected by the imperfection of his powers.

But it is just in the cases where numerical calculation is impossible or unsuitable that the politician is likely to get most help by using consciously quantitative conceptions.

It is at this point that a resolute and able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous.

Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how to govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of 'that staring timid creature man.'

[51] A century before Darwin he, like Swift and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few 'among the societies of men ...

Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon accounts more votaries than Bentham.'[54]

It was Disraeli who treated Queen Victoria 'like a woman,' and Gladstone, with the Oxford training from which he never fully recovered, who treated her 'like a public meeting.'

In spite of Disraeli's essentially kindly spirit, his calculated play upon the instincts of the nation which he governed seemed to many in his time to introduce a cold and ruthless element into politics, which seemed colder and more ruthless when it appeared in the …

And yet they might learn that no greatly improved organisation was possible for creatures hampered by such limited powers of observation and inference, and enslaved by such furious passions.

They might be forced to recognise that as long as they were bees their life must remain bewildered and violent and short.

Political inquiry deals with man as he now is, and with the changes in the organisation of his life that can be made during the next few centuries.

… important political result of the vast range of new knowledge started by Darwin's work may prove to be the extension of the idea of conduct so as to include the control of mental processes of which at present most men are either unconscious or unobservant.

The limits of our conscious conduct are fixed by the limits of our self-knowledge.

Before men knew anger as something separable from the self that knew it, and before they had made that knowledge current by the invention of a name, the control of anger was not a question of conduct.

But the deliberate following of prescription which Burke advocated was something different, because it was the result of choice, from the uncalculated loyalty of the past.

Those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge cannot forget.

In other matters than politics the influence of the fruit of that tree is now spreading further over our lives.

Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grape nuts on principle.'[59] But since we cannot unlearn our knowledge,

Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to eat caviare on principle.

The physician, when he knows the part which mental suggestion plays in the cure of disease, may hate and fear his knowledge, but he cannot divest himself of it.

The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic evolution.

Mental habits count for more in politics than do the acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences.

When an English clergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his Times or Mail, his attitude towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief or doubt that he who uttered certain commandments about non-resistance and poverty was God Himself, but by the …

I therefore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of those who voted in the borough, voted a 'straight ticket.' If for any reason the party committee put, to use an Americanism, a 'yellow dog' among the list of names,

I voted for the yellow dog.

Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to vote on the same ticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied down different marks from my party card.

Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether 'democracy once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such-like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real,' and had answered, '

Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting.

The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner:

Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether 'democracy once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such-like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real,' and had answered, 'Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting.

The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote.

If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain those conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot—the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again.'[91]

Directly we begin this process one fact becomes obvious. There is no reason why the same system should not be applied to the appointment of the officials of the local as to those of the central government.

It is an amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of the English people that we have never seriously considered this point.

In America the term Civil Service is applied equally to both groups of offices, and 'Civil Service principles' are understood to cover State and Municipal as well as Federal appointments.

Some few railways have systems of competition for boy clerks, even more inadequate than those carried on by municipalities; but one is told that under most of the companies both appointment and promotion may be influenced by the favour of directors or large shareholders.

We regulate the minutiae of coupling and signalling on the railways, but do not realise that the safety of the public depends even more directly upon their systems of patronage.

How far this principle should be extended, and how far, for instance, it would be possible to prevent the head of a great private firm from ruining half a country side by leaving the management of his business to a hopelessly incompetent relation, is a …

In literature and science as well as in commerce and industry the independent producer is dying out and the official is taking his place.

We are nearly all of us officials now, bound during our working days, whether we write on a newspaper, or teach in a university, or keep accounts in a bank, by restrictions on our personal freedom in the interest of a larger organisation.

We are little influenced by that direct and obvious economic motive which drives a small shopkeeper or farmer or country solicitor to a desperate intensity of scheming how to outstrip his rivals or make more profit out of his employees.

and he based his own plans for the reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of God, as revealed by the existing correspondence of national uniformities with geographical facts.

'God,' he said, 'divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth.... Evil governments have disfigured the Divine design.

Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked out—at least as far as Europe is concerned—by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions.'[101]

has but two paths before him. He is compelled to choose between despotism and inertia.'[103] He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he puts out to sea, prays to God,

'Help me my God! My boat is so small and Thy ocean so wide.'

[104]

But now that we can look at it without helpless pain it may stir the deepest impulses of our being. To some of us it may bring confidence in that Love that Dante saw, 'which moves the Sun and the other Stars.'

To each of us it may suggest a kinder pity for all the bewildered beings who hand on from generation to generation the torch of conscious life.

Political, Economy (in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana), 2nd edition (1850), p. 26.