Quotes by Political Scientists - Page 5

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.
Samuel P. Huntington
The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.
Charles Murray
In never-ending efforts to defeat incumbent officeholders in hard times, the public is perpetuating the source of its discontent, electing a new group of people who are even less inclined to or capable of crafting compromise or solutions to pressing problems.
Thomas E. Mann
People are rarely diabolic or bent enthusiastically on evil. As a rule, they are only weak; they cannot resist temptation and thus give way to their evil drives.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.
Antonio Negri
This is the world in which everyone is sensitised to risk but indifferent to fate.
David Runciman
cross-national studies show that the U.S. poverty rate, which stands persistently above 12 percent, is not only the highest poverty rate of any advanced industrial nation, but is more than twice the average for that group.Pursuing the American Dream, 9, 276
Calvin C. Jillson
Measured in terms of the World Bank poverty standard, the number of poor people in China fell from 652 million to 135 million between 1981 and 2004 - in other words, more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty. The number of poor people in the developing world as a whole declined by only 400 million over the same period. In other words, but for China, there would have been an increase in the number of poor people in the developing world. No wonder a World Bank report said that "a fall in the number of poor of this magnitude over such a short period is without historical precedent.
Wang Shaoguang
The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools-- Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues.
Robert D. Putnam
People need self-respect, that 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
The percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3% in 2010.
Charles Murray
Egotism fears its own self.
Alexis de Tocqueville
It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.
Robert C. Tucker
Hegel represents history as the self-realization of spirit (Geist) or God. The fundamental scheme of his theory is as follows. Spirit is self-creative energy imbued with a drive to become fully conscious of itself as spirit. Nature is spirit in its self-objectification in space; history is spirit in its self-objectification as culture—the succession of world-dominant civilizations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Spirit actualizes its nature as self-conscious being by the process of knowing. Through the mind of man, philosophical man in particular, the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit. This process involves the repeated overcoming of spirit's alienation (Entfremdung) from itself, which takes place when spirit as the knowing mind confronts a world that appears, albeit falsely, as objective, i.e. as other than spirit. Knowing is recognition, whereby spirit destroys the illusory otherness of the objective world and recognizes it as actually subjective or selbstisch. The process terminates at the stage of "absolute knowledge," when spirit is finally and fully "at home with itself in its otherness," having recognized the whole of creation as spirit—Hegelianism itself being the scientific form of this ultimate self-knowledge on spirit's part.
Robert C. Tucker
Odd, some might think. Why someone would need to travel so far to find oneself. Surely a look in the mirror would suffice, and wouldn’t that be cheaper too? But the mirror lies, and the eyes that do the looking conspire too.
Farish A. Noor
For benefits by their very greatness spotlight the difference in conditions and arouse a secret annoyance in those who profit from them. But the charm of simple good manners is almost irresistible.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Etymologically, "compassion" means to suffer together. "Together," however, is different from "identically." Compassion is not the same as selflessness, and not really the opposite of selfishness. Rather, it provides a basis for helping other people that is materially disinterested but emotionally self-regarding. As Rousseau wrote in Emile, "When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself..." Or, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, "Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.
William Voegeli
Does affirmative action place minority students in colleges where they're likely to fail while depriving other applicants of the chance to attend the most challenging schools where they are capable of succeeding? Does rent control drive up the cost of housing, depriving property owners of the same opportunity to profit as any other investor while driving down the quality and quantity of the housing stock? Do minimum wage laws reduce the number of entry-level jobs, making it harder to escape from poverty? Because compassion, by its nature, subordinates doing good to feeling good, these are questions the warm-hearted rarely pursue.
William Voegeli
Of all the Wonders in the World, the greatest wonder of all, was sharing it with you.
Lisa Anderson
Most Americans watch Friends rather than having friends.
Robert Putnam
Corporate anthropologist Karen Stephenson argues that though trust is the natural glue of human connection since prehistoric times, it is mostly absent in modern hierarchies—especially in government, where vertical silos compete with and undermine one another, often within the same bureaucracy.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers.
Charles Murray
... common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong.
George Friedman
My mind is the pendant, creativity is the chain
Helen M. Ingram
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened... Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be... We are apparently on the trail here of some sort of invisible or hidden hand that beneficially hides difficulties from us.
Albert O. Hirschman
A man is born; his first years go by in obscurity amid the pleasures or hardships of childhood. He grows up; then comes the beginning of manhood; finally society's gates open to welcome him; he comes into contact with his fellows. For the first time he is scrutinized and the seeds of the vices and virtues of his maturity are thought to be observed forming in him. This is, if I am not mistaken, a singular error.Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first word which arouse with him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness...In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.
Robert Putnam
In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth, and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households.
Robert D. Putnam
Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely to interact regularly only with kin and neighborhood children, which limits their formation of valuable weak ties.
Robert D. Putnam
Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids. For economic productivity and growth, our country needs as much talent as we can find, and we certainly can’t afford to waste it. The opportunity gap imposes on all of us both real costs and what economists term “opportunity costs.
Robert D. Putnam
[In case of zombie uprising] Marxists and Feminists would likely sympathize more with zombies. To Marxists, the undead symbolize the oppressed proletariat. Unless the zombies were all undead white males, feminists would likely welcome the posthuman smashing of existing patriarchal structures.
Daniel W. Drezner
Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. "Individual sovereignty" is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one' s individual potential is one of the basic "rights" to which all humans are born. Yet Spanish anarchists were firmly rooted in the communalist-anarchist tradition. For them, freedom was fundamentally a social product: the fullest expression of individuality and of creativity can be achieved only in and through community. As Carmen Conde (a teacher who was also active in Mujeres Libres) wrote, describing the relationship of individuality and community: "I and my truth; I and my faith ... And I for you, but without ever ceasing to be me, so that you can always be you. Because I don' t exist without your existence, but my existence is also indispensable to yours.
Martha A. Ackelsberg
Direct action meant that the goal of any and all of these activities was to provide ways for people to get in touch with their own powers and capacities, to take back the power of naming themselves and their lives. It was to be distinguished from more conventional political activity even in a democratic system. Instead of attempting to make change by forming interest groups to pressure politicians, anarchists insisted that we learn to think and act for ourselves by joining together in organizations in which our experience, our perception, and our activity can guide and make the change. Knowledge does not precede experience, it flows from it: "We begin by deciding to work, and through working, we learn ... We will learn how to live in libertarian communism by living in it." People learn how to be free only by exercising freedom: "We are not going to find ourselves ... with people ready-made for the future ... Without the continued exercise of their faculties, there will be no free people ... The external revolution and the internal revolution presuppose one another, and they must be simultaneous in order to be successful.
Martha A. Ackelsberg
Sixty years is too brief a compass for man’s imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life.
Alexis de Tocqueville
That man who is without religion and mercy should be rejected. A guru without spiritual knowledge should be rejected. The wife with an offensive face should be given up and so should relatives who are without affection.
Chanakya
Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power, or debased by the habit of obedience; but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegitimate, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Superior might does not guarantee success, especially in a war where political considerations dominate.
Richard H. Shultz Jr.
Power is nothing unless you can turn it into influence.
Condoleezza Rice
Through no-fault divorce, one parent can now declare unilaterally that the marriage has "broken down" and invite the state in to take control and remove the other parent without the parent having committed any legal transgression. What the government then offers to the parent who invites it in is the promise that her invitation will be rewarded; the state will establish her as a puppet government, a satrap of the state within the family. This requires that not the faithless but the faithful parent be punished.
Stephen Baskerville
What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business--not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil--are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed, Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn the proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have not hired for services they have neither requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. . . Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by theives.
Stephen Baskerville
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Peace can happen in 24 hours....just like war can happen in 24 hours.
Sari Nusseibeh
The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.
Michael Parenti
History is nothing if not far-fetched.
Albert O. Hirschman
A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.
Henry Kissinger
In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.
Alexis de Tocqueville
History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy
Zbigniew Brzeziński
Regardless of whether people have free will, human flourishing requires that they live in an environment in which they are treated as if they did.
Charles Murray
A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
Henry Kissinger
Africa PRODUCES what it does NOT CONSUME and CONSUMES what it does NOT PRODUCE.
Ali A. Mazrui
When justice is more certain and more mild, is at the same time more efficacious.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Statesmen should remember that they have been elected to persuade and to lead, and not just to accept as fixed the momentary moods and pernicious prejudices of the public.
Stanley Hoffmann
A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that captures the frustration, anger, or fear of the group's members and places responsibility where it is warranted.
David E. Wilkins
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God
Henry Kissinger
The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry Kissinger