Political Scientist Quotes

Loyalty is an asset, independent and scarce, parceled out among different contestants for power. No ruling government or nonruling group enjoys absolute loyalty - no contestant can have the whole pie.

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

Jeane Kirkpatrick

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.

Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.

George Friedman

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

Arthur Twining Hadley

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

Henry Jones Ford

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

'Canadian society' or the 'Canadian nation' cannot decide anything, because no one is in charge.

Thomas Flanagan

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.

All impartial men who are moved by justice and not by racialism want India to be ruled by Indians.

Francisco Luís Gomes

The Kennedy home was a place of much action and laughter, a lively, brawling mob of children overseen by a mother who knew when to look the other way.

James David Barber

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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