John Mearsheimer - Power Quotes

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The cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one's own survival.

John Mearsheimer
The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies.

John Mearsheimer
The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power among themselves for the foreseeable future.

John Mearsheimer
A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth.

John Mearsheimer
Preserving power, rather than increasing it, is the main goal of states.

John Mearsheimer
The Soviet Union and its empire disappeared in large part because its smokestack economy could no longer keep up with the technological progress of the world's major economic powers.

John Mearsheimer
I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020.

John Mearsheimer
States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power.

John Mearsheimer
Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity.

John Mearsheimer
Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves.

John Mearsheimer
In an ideal world, where there are only good states, power would be largely irrelevant.

John Mearsheimer
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