Political Scientist Quotes

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
Joseph Nye
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.

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
As'ad AbuKhalil
What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.

In addition, a century or more of efforts to arrive at a feasible and politically acceptable mix of market and nonmarket elements has not produced a definitive, stable, or uniform solution.

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

Why, if (as Boaz maintains) the liberty of a human being to own another should be trumped by equal human rights, the liberty to own large amounts of property should not also be trumped by equal human rights?

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

Then what explains war among states? Rousseau's answer is really that war occurs because there is nothing to prevent it.

Kenneth Waltz
Kenneth Waltz
Right now, [the Israel lobby] has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from.

In its distinctive strategy and internal dynamics and its rich intellectual tradition, Hizb al-Tahrir points up the heterogeneity of twentieth-century Islamist protest movements in the Middle East.

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

Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon