Joseph Nye Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

If Thucydides were plopped down in the Middle East or East Asia, he would probably recognize the situation quite quickly.

Joseph Nye
Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want, and that can be done by coercion, payment or attraction.

Joseph Nye
Some observers feel it is harder to change public opinion in democracies than it is to change policies in totalitarian countries.

Joseph Nye
Systems can create consequences not intended by any other of their constituent actors.

Joseph Nye
When words are both descriptive and prescriptive, thyey become political words used in struggles for power.

Joseph Nye
Power, like love, is easier to experience than to define or measure.

Joseph Nye
Some say precipitating events are like buses - they come along every ten minutes.

Joseph Nye
Cooperation is difficult in the absence of communication.

Joseph Nye
Anarchy means without government, but it does not necessarily mean chaos or total disorder.

Joseph Nye
Just as gunpowder and infantry penetrated and destroyed the medieval castle, so have nuclear missiles and the internet made the nation-state obsolete.

Joseph Nye
Attention rather than information becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power.

Joseph Nye
In foreign policy, as in medicine, leaders must first do no harm.

Joseph Nye
The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it.

Joseph Nye
The international system consists not only of states. The international political system is the pattern of relationships among the states.

Joseph Nye
The cure to misunderstanding history is to read more, not less.

Joseph Nye
Effective foreign policymaking requires an understanding of not only international and transnational systems, but also the intricacies of domestic politics in multiple countries. It also demands recognition of just how little is known about building nations, particularly after revolutions – a process that should be viewed in terms of decades, not years.

Joseph Nye
Governments now have to share the stage with actors who can use information to enhance their soft power and press governments directly, or indirectly by mobilizing their publics.

Joseph Nye
The territorial state has not always existed in the past, so it need not necessarily exist in the future.

Joseph Nye
Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties.

Joseph Nye
The world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a strange cocktail of continuity and change. Some aspects of international politics have not changed since Thucydides. There is a certain logic of hostility, a dilemma about security that goes with interstate politics. Alliances, balance of power, and choices in in policy between war and compromise have remained similar over the millennia.

Joseph Nye
Chamberlain's sins were not his intentions, but rather his ignorance and arrogance in failing to appraise the situation properly. And in that failure he was not alone.

Joseph Nye
Power conversion is the capacity to convert potential power, as measured by resources, to realized power, as measured by the changed behavior of others.

Joseph Nye
Some economists believe that the Great Depression of the 1930s was aggravated by bad monetary policy and lack of American leadership. Britain was too weak to maintain an open international economy, and the United States was not living up to its new responsibilities.

Joseph Nye
I have found in my experience in government that I could ignore neither the age-old nor the brand-new dimensions of world politics.

Joseph Nye
The bipolar world is over, but it not going to be replaced by a unipolar world empire that the United States controls alone. The world is already economically multipolar, and there will be a diffusion of power as the information revolution progresses, interdependence increases, and transnational actors become more important. The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that.

Joseph Nye