Kenneth Minogue

Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call __he mandate of heaven_, but life for the peasant changes little.

The search for liberation is a rejection of the responsibilities of freedom in favor of a release into the irresponsibility of rights. And a right is irresponsible because it is a legally entrenched liberty that does not contain within itself the limitations instinctive in a free society.

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal _ as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.