Political Scientist Quotes

Nicolas de Condorcet
Condoleezza Rice
George F. Kennan
Raymond Aron
Herbert A. Simon
Francis Fukuyama
Samuel P. Huntington

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

Jeane Kirkpatrick
Jeane Kirkpatrick
The most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise - and occasionally the application - of the view that all people, and not just one's own kind, are entitled to fair treatment.

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.

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

Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
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 overriding crucial implication of the structural adjustment policies was that the villagers would have to fend for themselves in all conceivable respects.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Animals belonging to the same species are like-minded, just as they are like-headed, like-bellied, like-limbed.

Communism and socialism can be connected to a single major author—Marx—and assessed as deviations from, and implementations or negations of, Marx. Democracy is not amenable to a similar treatment; the towering, single major author on democracy does not exist.

All sciences are considered by their professors as equally significant; by the politicians, as equally incomprehensible; and by the military as equally expensive.

Remind yourself that the only thing you can truly control is you - and your reaction to what the world throws at you.

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

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

Robert D. Putnam
Robert D. Putnam
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.

The ultimate test of practical leadership is the realization of intended, real change that meets people's enduring needs.

Space is only 80 miles from every person on earth — far closer than most people are to their own national capitals.

Contingency Theory is not a theory at all, in the conventional sense of theory as a well-developed set of interrelated propositions. It is more an orienting strategy or metatheory, suggesting ways in which a phenomenon ought to be conceptualized or as approach to the phenomenon ought to be explained. Drawn primarily from large-scale empirical studies, contingency theory relies on a few assumptions that have been explicitly stated, and these guide contingency research.

The world is more than a game of cards. History is more than a record of gambling operations.

Arthur Twining Hadley
Arthur Twining Hadley
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
Francis Fukuyama
'Canadian society' or the 'Canadian nation' cannot decide anything, because no one is in charge.

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

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

Even if a government can be constitutional without being democratic, it cannot be democratic without being constitutional.

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.

Robert Pape
Robert Pape