American Political Scientist Quotes

By the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, political science courses had begun appearing on college campuses. This was followed by the establishment of political science departments and degree programs.

Hayek's trade cycle theory was not in essence the same as Mises's.

Alan O. Ebenstein

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

It is now fifty years since Woodrow Wilson wrote his brilliant essay on public administration.' It is a good essay to reread every so often; there is so much in it that sounds modern, so much that will hold permanently true... Political scientists owe Woodrow Wilson a debt of gratitude for opening their eyes to the broader importance and implications of administration. His keen mind also discerned the task which would occupy the attention of administrative theorists long after he was gone.

Marshall E. Dimock

Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware.

Harold Lasswell

What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.

Nonviolent action involves opposing the opponent's power, including his police & military capacity, not with the weapons chosen by him but by quite different means...Repression by the opponent is used against his own power position in a kind of political " ju-jitsu " and the very sources of his power thus reduced or removed, with the result that his political and military position is seriously weakened or destroyed.

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

The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so. The time is long past to put it out of business.

Norman Finkelstein

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.

People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there.

Robert D. Putnam

After I left the White House, I kept a foothold in the business of American politics; as a talk-show host, analyst, commentator, speechmaker, and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner, but I was still a partisan, a Democrat, a blue-stater through and through.

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

Humility, which Burke ranked high among the virtues, is the only effectual restraint upon this congenital vanity; yet our world has nearly forgotten the nature of humility. Submission to the dictates of humility formerly was made palatable to man by the doctrine of grace; that elaborate doctrine has been overwhelmed by modern presumption.

At first it was the incomes of corporations, then of rich citizens, then of well-provided widows and opulent workers, and finally the wealth of housemaids and the tips of waitresses. This is all in line with the ability to pay doctrine. The poor, simply because there are more of them, have more ability to pay than the rich.

MANAGEMENT involves the concrete practices and the observable techniques of administration. Frequently the term management is used synonymously with administration, and it is invariably assumed that a good manager is a good organizer. All of these usages are justified in the general terminology of administration, but in its more specialized sense management refers to the following specific techniques:

Albert Lepawsky

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

Jeane Kirkpatrick

The french revolution has not received more attention than it deserves; but in comparison disproportionately little attention has been given to the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. In a more modest way, these too helped fix the shape of the modern world. Specifically, most of the devices and ideas which have found expression in subsequent constitutions date from the experiments and theories of that day.

Francis D. Wormuth

Procedure is not a unique feature of public administration. It is a concomitant of all organized activity, and many procedures are equally usable by private administration or public administration. Private as well as public "red tape" can be time-consuming and annoying to those affected, as anyone can testify who has tried to exchange a purchase without a sales slip or to cash a check without "proper identification.

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

Herbert A. Simon