Quotes by Political Scientists - Page 4

America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
Alexis de Tocqueville
He who in given cases consents to obey his fellows with servility, and who submits his will, and even his thoughts, to their control, how can he pretend that he wishes to be free?
Alexis de Tocqueville
Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.
Alexis de Tocqueville
What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
Alexis de Tocqueville
It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.
Alexis de Tocqueville
It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating… even awe-inspiring, but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.
Herbert Simon
Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.
Robert D. Putnam
Christians today who view the Bible as God's unadulterated and inerrant word are rightly labeled fundamentalists, while Muslims who think the same of the Qur'an are simply considered Muslims.
Hamed Abdel-Samad
...differences between the world's Muslim communities are less important than what they share-namely, Islamism, sharia, and the dream of caliphate.
Hamed Abdel-Samad
Some Westerners […] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.
Samuel P. Huntington
Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.
Samuel P. Huntington
As Charles Stewart Parnell called out during the Irish rent strike campaign in 1879 and 1880:It is no use relying on the Government . . . . You must only rely upon your own determination . . . . Help yourselves by standing together . . . strengthen those amongst yourselves who are weak . . . , band yourselves together, organize yourselves . . . and you must win . . . When you have made this question ripe for settlement,then and not till then will it be settled.
Gene Sharp
People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned -- it cannot be self-respect if it's not earned -- and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.
Charles Murray
Responsibility for the consequences of actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards.
Charles Murray
Slavery received, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.
Henry Kissinger
Sometimes it's hard to see the rainbow when there's been endless days of rain.
Christina Greer
There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Durability is one of the chief elements of strength. Nothing is either loved or feared but that which is likely to endure.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The idea that the president has the power to craft a new strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of reality crafted by those who came before him. We are all trapped in circumstances into which we were born and choices that were made for us.
George Friedman
Because widespread participation is so central to popular sovereignty, we can say that the less political participation there is in a society, the weaker the democracy.
Edward S. Greenberg
A less well known impact of immigrant populations is the increase that destination states gain in Congress where apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives is calculated on the basis of a state's entire adult population regardless of legal status. And, because each state's electoral college vote is the sum of the number of its representatives in the House and its two senators, high immigration states play a larger role in presidential elections than they might if only adult citizens and legal aliens were counted in population surveys.
Edward S. Greenberg
For the most part, the evidence shows that individual Americans do not care a great deal about politics and are rather poorly informed, unstable in their views, and not much interested in participating in the political process. These findings have led some observers to assert that citizens are ill-equipped for the responsibility of self-governance and that public opinion (the will of the majority) should not be the ultimate determinant of what government does.
Edward S. Greenberg
It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few and limited powers.
James Q. Wilson
The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.
Gene Sharp
Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville
In such an admirable position of the New World, man has no other enemy than himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The imagination of creative thought can be a crazy place,this giving reason to write it down to try and make sense of it all.
Helen Ingram
Humans pursuing deep, complete connections respond to quite different incentives from those that influence self-interested utility maximizers. Rewards, monitoring, and punishments are less likely to be effective than engagement, communication, norms, socialization, identity, and common purpose. They share not out of a calculation of reciprocity but from a psychological pleasure in sharing. Those seeking connections make decisions from their hearts as well as their heads, influenced by emotion, fairness, empathy, and intuition. Their behavior, thoughts, feelings, and even personal attributes are highly socially contingent. The range of humanity includes individuals who display every possible combination of selfishness and sociability.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives… The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.
Benedict Anderson
The shock which the Nazi horrors produced was so great, because they came after two hundred years of Roussellian propaganda about the goodness of human nature and also because the Germans were literate, clean, technologically progressive, hard working, “modern,” sober, “orderly,” and so forth. Yet about human nature we get more concrete and more pertinent information from the Bible than from statistics dealing with secondary education, the frequency of bathtubs or the mileage of superhighways.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
Joseph Schumpeter
Considerable social science research has found that constant praise of children can backfire, because it so often consists of telling children how smart they are, not of praising children for the things they actually do. As a result, many children become protective of their image of being smart and are reluctant to take chances that might actually damage that image.
Charles Murray
What is called family pride is often founded on the illusion of self-love. A man wishes to perpetuate and immortalize himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.
Zbigniew Brzeziński
[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.
Zbigniew Brzeziński
Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends
Alexis de Tocqueville
Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.
George Friedman
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
Samuel P. Huntington
Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.
George Friedman
It used to be that parents didn't have to be home. If a neighbor so I child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence.Unmarried and divorced parents tend not to behave that way. Instead, they tend to try to be the good guy to their children.
Charles Murray
Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded in premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data.
Charles Murray
the most lovable of exceptional American qualities (is) our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.
Charles Murray
They don't know the distinction between taking care of a child and raising a child.
Charles Murray
The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960.
Charles Murray
Culture is the celebration of diversity. Let us therefore not deny our origin; but instead celebrate ours as a cultural mosaic not a tower of Babel , but a power of Babel
Ali A. Mazrui
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Nations as well as men require time to learn, whatever may be their intelligence or zeal.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he has become their equal.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.
Samuel Huntington
The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural.
Alexis de Tocqueville
In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville