Trego's Mountain Ear

I am fundamentally a Weberian Sociologist – and some have claimed that Weber’s writings are merely a long-running debate with the ghost of Karl Marx. However you translate it, at the foundation, the base of my thoughts on society is that there is a hell of a lot of social conflict going on.

In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, ‘Now shut up and obey me.’ People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.

The great virtue of bureaucracy – indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic ~ was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.

It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.

Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts – I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.

The nation is burdened with the heavy curse on those who come afterwards. The generation before us was inspired by an activism and a naive enthusiasm, which we cannot rekindle, because we confront tasks of a different kind from those which our fathers faced.