Alan Bullock Quotations

Bullock by name, and Bullock by nature.

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.

If the country is to survive as a democracy it will depend on voters who understand how our political institutions have evolved and the events that went into their creation. A nation's sense of its history is indistinguishable from its social cohesion.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Evil is a form of incompetence.

The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way.

Hitler had a plausible case to argue when he claimed that the Anschluss was only the application of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination.

Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.

Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law.

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.