Tardiness is the rudeness of kings, and punctuality the necessary politeness of their subjects.
Mar 022015
Ruling
In ’37 Stalin made a hash
Of party loyalists and army brass.
Decimation: One in ten are shot.
What’s the word when one in ten are not?
Feb 262015
It is easy to rule people who are persuaded that they rule themselves.
Feb 232015
For every empire history offers a hundred explanations for why it fell, when what we need to know is how it lasted.
Nov 262014
It is futile to expect judges to uphold laws of which they disapprove when people refuse to believe anything they find unpleasant.
Nov 202014
Beware the Houyhnhnms. The Yahoos are of no consequence.
Nov 102014
The two great metaphors for society in political philosophy have been machine and organism: thus the two for the individual have been cog and cell.
Nov 042014
Ideologies must be classed not by what they intend to build but by what they intend to destroy.
Nov 032014
Hard cases make bad law, and good law makes hard cases.
Oct 282014
The worse the government, the longer the speeches.
Oct 212014
Abroad we make our soldiers pretend to be policemen, and at home we let our policemen pretend to be soldiers.