Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

It is as futile and dangerous to aim at making of society one large family, as sentimental socialism seeks to do, as to aim at making of it one large team, as positivist socialism seeks to do.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

It is passing strange that our philosophers of the Revolutionary period should have formed their conception of a free society by reference to societies where everyone was not free - where, in fact, the vast majority were not free. It is no less strange that they never stopped to ask whether perhaps the characters which they so much admired were not made possible by the existence of a class which was not free. Rousseau, in whose philosophy were many things, was fully conscious of this difficulty: "Must we say that liberty is possible only on a basis of slavery? Perhaps we must.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

Power changes its appearance but not its reality.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

Ransack the history of revolutions, and it will be found that every fall of a regime has been presaged by a defiance which went unpunished. It is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a Power from which the magic virtue has gone out, falls.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a melee of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety of the appetites to be satisfied will prevent the satisfaction of any single one. Clearly, then, the effect of the pursuit of private ends under cover of the public good will be worse if there are many with a hand in power than if there is only one.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

The entire stock of relationships which suited in war—militia—was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace—dome. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilization.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

The idea so commonly found that skepticism leads to toleration arises from considering the effects of skepticism in the intellectual who takes no active part - not its effects in the man of action. In the man of action, moral relativism and skepticism as to the absolute and universal value of his principles are no obstacle to a fanatical belief in their immediate value as his own clan at the actual moment; they do not weaken in the least his will to impose his principles. How should he glimpse a soul of truth in the principles of others, entitling them to respect, when he does not believe in noble origins of this kind even for his own principles?

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

The law of all modern states takes account of associations, whose members, in theory, pursue the common end with equal zeal. The experience of all associations proves, however, that this is not the case, and that a lively, constant and vigorous awareness of the end is found only in a minority of the associates; an association is really rather like a comet—a large tail of docile followers dragged along by a small dynamic head.

— Bertrand De Jouvenel