..There will be the direct weakening effect, but much worse will be the inner psychological conflict between those who wish to reunite her and those who oppose this. New vested interest will be created which will resist change and progress, a new evil Karma will pursue us in the future. One wrong step leads to another; so it has been in the past and so it may be in the future. And yet wrong steps have to be taken sometimes lest some worse peril befall us; that is the great paradox of politics, and no man can say with surety whether present wrong-doing is better and safer in the end than the possibility of that imagined peril.

Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures correspondingly erroneous.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

So it happens in political affairs; if the motions of rulers be constantly opposite and cross to the tempers and inclination of the people, they will be resented as arbitrary and harsh; as, on the other side, too much deference, or encouragement, as too often it has been, to popular faults and errors, is full of danger and ruinous consequences.

It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.

There's a paradox in every paradigm.

There is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.

Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep desire for absolutes. The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or even, dreadful thought, educational.

...There's no right answer
to the wrong question.
Now what do we do?

One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies.

"But I believe it is also true that a government committed to the policy of improving the nation by improving the condition of <i>some</i> of the individuals will eventually run into trouble in attempting to distinguish between a national good and a chocolate sundae.
… I think that one hazard of the "benefit" form of government is the likelihood that there will be an indefinite extensions of benefits, each new one establishing an easy precedent for the next.
Another hazard is that by placing large numbers of people under obligation to their government there will develop a self-perpetuating party capable of supplying itself with a safe majority."

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians.

If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.

An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.