Sublime

The most secure communities do not have the most police. They are the ones with the resources to meet people’s needs.

The single greatest enemy of contemporary satisfaction may be the belief in human perfectibility. We have been driven to collective rage through the apparently generous yet in reality devastating idea that it might be within our natural remit to be completely and enduringly happy.

In one of the most haunting passages of his masterwork, Democracy in America, he says that democracies are at risk of a completely new form of oppression for which there is no precedent in the past. It will happen, he says, when people exist solely in and for themselves, leaving the pursuit of the common good to the government. This is what life wo

The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist.

Most people are broadly communitarian: small-c conservative in their approach to matters of state and small-s socialist on public services, fair play and hard work. They cherish liberty but value authority too.

For the situation is this: our greatest peril lurks in the European drift towards egalitarianism, for it is this prospect which wearies us – we see today nothing which wishes to be greater, we surmise that everything is still, retreating, going backwards, regressing towards something more reserved, more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable,

Tocqueville