20th-century Political Scientist Quotes

Condoleezza Rice

George F. Kennan

Raymond Aron

Herbert A. Simon

Francis Fukuyama

Samuel P. Huntington

Benedict Anderson

I have lived half of my life in "Western society" and never encountered those principles [listed by the NYT as "Western"]. What is wrong with me. … So Mr. Bush stands for "gender equality, religious freedom, scientific inquiry and the rule of law" and I have never noticed?

As'ad AbuKhalil

The theory of evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between members of the same species and even between members of different species.

I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high - whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops - is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them.

Andrew Bacevich

The G-Zero isn't aspirational, it's analytic. Unfortunately, it's also where we are.

Worldviews are more a mental security blanket than a serious effort to understand the world

The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology.... For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, MA...

Francis Fukuyama

Until the modern era there was no single international system, but rather several international systems, with little or no contact with another.

Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.

Samuel P. Huntington

Foreign policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame.

Bearing all this in mind, we see that there is no Russian national understanding which would permit the early establishment in Russia of anything resembling the private enterprise system as we know it.

George F. Kennan

Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

At its heart, this book is about where this new left has come from, and where it might be going.

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume the burden. He guessed right.

John Mearsheimer

In a despotic government, the ultimate principle of order issues from the inclinations of the despot himself. Yet despotism is not a system in which justice is entirely meaningless: it has generally prevailed in highly traditional societies where custom is king and the prevailing terms of justice are accepted as part of the natural order of things. Each person fits into a divinely recognized scheme. Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call 'the mandate of heaven', but life for the peasant changes little. Everything depends on the wisdom of the ruler.

Kenneth Minogue

Power positions do not yield to arguments, however rationally and morally valid, but only to superior power.

Hans Morgenthau

When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.

Wilson's analytical theory assumed that the natural and inevitable tendency in any system of government is to have recourse to some sovereign body that will exercise "ultimate supremacy" and have the last say in making collective decisions. It is in this sense that we speak of a government as have a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of authority and use of force in society. Indeed, much of contemporary political science is based on this presumption.

There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 11 September attacks. There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it.

Condoleezza Rice

No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.

Scientific discovery, when viewed in detail, is an excruciatingly slow and painful process.

Herbert A. Simon

Right now, [the Israel lobby] has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from.

Then what explains war among states? Rousseau's answer is really that war occurs because there is nothing to prevent it.

Why, if (as Boaz maintains) the liberty of a human being to own another should be trumped by equal human rights, the liberty to own large amounts of property should not also be trumped by equal human rights?

Jeffrey Friedman

The chances for a problem to rise on the decision agenda are dramatically increased if a solution is attached.

John W. Kingdon

Would you, like Benjamin Constant, have concluded that events as tumultuous as these ought to lead to the reestablishment of a liberal and constitutional order? If your name were Carl Schmitt, you would have done the exact opposite: you would have interpreted the tumult of your times as the best reason for getting rid of liberalism altogether.