Home > Author > Elie Kedourie
1 " The prevalent fashion has been to proclaim the latest revolution as the herald of a new day, and the newest turbulence as the necessary and beneficent prelude to an epoch of orderliness and justice. "
― Elie Kedourie , The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies
2 " In the case of the Levant, it is mere question-begging rhetoric to insist that similarities are more fundamental or essential than differences. For who is to say, where human groups and their interestsare in question, what is fundamental and what is secondary, what is essential and what is accidental? And even if the answers were clear, they could not by themselves determine a political decision. Political decisions are not scientific conclusions; they are rather the promptings of the practical judgment, in which play their part inclination and duty, circumstance and foresight. "
3 " In the case of the Levant, it is mere question-begging rhetoric to insist that similarities are more fundamental or essential than differences. For who is to say, where human groups and their interests are in question, what is fundamental and what is secondary, what is essential and what is accidental? And even if the answers were clear, they could not by themselves determine a political decision. Political decisions are not scientific conclusions; they are rather the promptings of the practical judgment, in which play their part inclination and duty, circumstance and foresight. "
― Elie Kedourie
4 " Moral indignation is a bad counsellor. "
5 " One's first impulse in the face of all this is to say, No good can come out of it. But this is in the lap of the future, and we are not diviners. Be it sufficient for the present to record that these things are evil. That persecutors and persecuted, hunters and hunted are in the grip of the powers of darkness. It is enough to elucidate how this came to pass, for the story can at least have this moral, that the consequences of action are incalculable, and that out of the desire to do good, good may not in fact ensue. "
6 " He was clearly out of his depth in Egyptian politics and accepted uncritically the opinion that, as he put it in a telegram, Zaghlul represented the "opinion of majority of Egyptian intellectuals" ; as though "Egyptian intellectuals' were a known or intelligible entity, as though their opinions - whatever they were or however ascertained - had overriding or primordial importance, and as though it made the smallest sense in such a situation to speak - except in the loosest and most misleading manner - of representation or representativeness. "
7 " History does not need explanatory principles, but only words to tell how things were. "
8 " This dogmatic and insistent moralism clearly ends by seriously impairing Toynbee's judgment. He refuses to concede what common experience teaches, namely that the wicked do quite often flourish like the green bay tree, that in human affairs force and violence are occasionally decisive, or that love and gentleness are sometimes productive of evil. "
