
The Future of Civilization (1938)
The Future of Civilization (1938)
Speech in Stourport (12 January 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 15-16.
1925
Context: If there is anything... it is my training, which has given me, whether I can use it or not, a knowledge and a sympathy very difficult for any man to attain who has had an exclusively political training I regard it as of the greatest value to myself that during the formative years of my life, and during the ten and twenty years when I first started work in the world, I worked in close contact with all classes of people in this country, and enjoyed, through no credit to myself, the goodwill which I have inherited from generations that have gone before me and left behind a name for honesty, fair play, right judgment, and kindliness to those with whom they worked. Through that, whether I succeed or not, I believe I have an understanding of the mind of the people of the country which I could have gained in no other way. It is through this that I have that ineradicable belief and faith in our people which sustains me through good times and evil, and it is because of this that I have every confidence that, whatever troubles may come to this country, or in this country at any time, the native strength and virtue of our people will overcome everything. There is only one thing which I feel is worth giving one's whole strength to, and that is the binding together of all classes of our people in an effort to make life in this country better in every sense of the word. That is the main end and object of my life in politics.
Source: Roch Marc Christian Kaboré (2021) cited in " Burkina Faso president picks former nuclear watchdog head Zerbo as PM https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20211211-burkina-faso-president-picks-former-nuclear-watchdog-head-zerbo-as-pm" on France 24, 11 December 2021.
A Great Experiment (1941), p. 189
Context: The truth is, I was never a very good Party man. Probably but for the War of 1914, I should have gone on fairly comfortably as a Conservative official. But those four years burnt into me the insufferable conditions of international relations which made war the acknowledged method — indeed, the only fully authorized method — of settling international disputes. Thenceforth, the effort to abolish war seemed to me, and still seems to me, the only political object worth while.
Source: Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life
Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. xi.
The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, 1984
Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008), p. 66