“Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth”

“Bismarck had cunningly taught the parties not to aim at national appeal but to represent interests. They remained class or sectional pressure-groups under the Republic. This was fatal, for it made the party system, and with it democratic parliamentarianism, seem a divisive rather than a unifying factor. Worse: it meant the parties never produced a leader who appealed beyond the narrow limits of his own following.”

“The Salem [witch] trials…can be seen as an example of the propensity of the American people to be convulsed by spasms of self-righteous rage against enemies, real or imaginary, of their society and way of living. Hence the parallels later drawn between Salem in 1692 and the “Red Scare” of 1919-20, Senator McCarthy’s hunt for Communists in the early 1950’s, the Watergate hysteria of 1973-74, and the Irangate hunt of the 1980s. What strikes the historian, however, is not just the intensity of the self-delusion in the summer of 1692, by no means unusual for the age, but the speed of the recovery from it in the autumn, and the anxiety of the local government and society to confess wrongdoing, to make reparation and search for the truth. That indeed is uncommon in any age. In the late 17th century it was perhaps more remarkable than the hysteria itself and a good augury for America’s future as a humane and truth-seeking commonwealth. The rule of law did indeed break down, but it was restored with promptness and penitence.”

“Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”

“Men are generally more law-abiding than women. Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them. ”

“This was all very well: Columbanus's success indicates the appeal of his mission. But his activities, for the first time, brought the nature of Celtic monasticism firmly to the attention of the Church authorities -- to western bishops in general, and to the Bishop of Rome in particular. The Irish monks were not heretical. But they were plainly unorthodox. They did not look right, to begin with. They had the wrong tonsure. Rome, as was natural, had 'the tonsure of St Peter', that is, a shaven crown. Easterners had the tonsure of St Paul, totally shaven; and if they wished to take up an appointment in the West they had to wait until their rim grew before being invested. But the Celts looked like nothing on earth: they had their hair long at the back and, on the shaven front part, a half-circle of hair from one ear to the other, leaving a band across the forehead.”

“A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.”