Quotes by Political Scientists - Page 6

I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Don't diss being a wife and mother in favor of chasing after something that seems sexy and significant. Be open to what God has for you, and let him add the excitement.
Lisa Anderson
A whole nation cannot rise above itself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
A central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit. If such an administration succeeds in convincing all the disposable resources of a people, it impairs at least the renewal of those resources.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
Alexis de Tocqueville
In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it.
Henry Kissinger
Imagine if one should drag an innocent passer-by from the street to the operating room of a nearby hospital and force him at gunpoint to perform a delicate operation. The man would burst into tears. However, if one were to ask him to sound off on problems such as nuclear experiments, Vietnam, the borders of Israel, support for Indonesia, aid to Latin America, or recognition of Red China, in most cases he would start spouting opinions.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
The failure of India's public institutions to keep pace with the dramatic political, economic and social transformations under way has led to severe gaps in governance. The end result of this disjuncture has been a proliferation of grand corruption - a malaise made up of a diverse array of regulatory, extractive, and political rent-seeking activities.
Milan Vaishnav
...the working classes—that motor of social transformation which Marx increasingly stipulated for the role of the proletariat; the dispossessed and alienated revolutionary vehicle of his early writings, which later became defined and analysed into the collective worker who 'owner' nothing but his labour power—chains rather than assets. In the event, the working class actually came to fulfill most of the optimistic prognoses of liberal thinkers; they have become largely 'socialized' through access to privilege, consumption, organization, and voting participation, as well as obtaining massive social benefits. They have become supporters of the status quo—not vociferous perhaps, but tacit approvers and beneficiaries none the less. The ferment today comes from sections of the community to whom political and social thought has never hitherto assigned any specific role; who have hitherto never developed specific political institutions of their own: youth, mostly students; racial minorities, a few dissident intellectuals—these form the new 'proletariat'. The basis of their dissatisfaction is not necessarily and always an objective level of deprivation but rather a mixture of relative deprivation—consciousness of possibilities and of the blockages which prevent their attainment—and above all an articulate dissatisfaction with the society around them. There is no good reason why such groups should not form, and act like, a proletariat in a perfectly Marxist sense. The economic causality collapses; the analysis of a decaying bourgeois society and the determination to overthrow it remain.
J. P. Nettl
The growth of revolutionary fervour in individual participants and its spread to ever wider sections of the population must primarily be the result of struggle itself, not the distillation of thought or the prescription of correct ideology by others.
J. P. Nettl
The bargaining position of the victor always diminishes with time. Whatever is not exacted during the shock of defeat becomes increasingly difficult to attain later.
Henry Kissinger
collecting secrets was and is crucial to solving foreign policy puzzles.
Gregory F. Treverton
Try to look at causes and solve problems. Do not concentrate on military solutions. Do not seek military solutions. Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy works.
Eqbal Ahmed
everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure
Alexis de Tocqueville
Please do not think that I am accusing socialists of insincerity or that I wish to hold them up to scorn either as bad democrats or as unprincipled schemers and opportunists. I fully believe, in spite of the childish Machiavellism in which some of their prophets indulge, that fundamentally most of them always have been as sincere in their professions as any other men. Besides, I do not believe in insincerity in social strife, for people always come to think what they want to think and what they incessantly profess. As regards democracy, socialist parties are presumably no more opportunists than are any others; they simply espouse democracy if, as, and when it serves their ideals and interests and not otherwise. Lest readers should be shocked and think so immoral a view worthy only of the most callous of political practitioners, ...
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. . . . A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself.. . . . I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as "murderous swine.
Eric Voegelin
International Relations are too important to be left to the specialists.
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch
With the single exception of the American Revolution, the aftermath of all revolutions from 1789 on only worsened the human condition.
Arnold Beichman
We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans
Zbigniew Brzeziński
Politicians are like dogs... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable
Henry Kissinger
Indeed, one concern would be that the initial neoconservative response to a zombie outbreak would be to invade Iraq again out of force of habit.
Daniel W. Drezner
Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.
Henry Kissinger
The principle of equality, which makes men independent of each other, gives them a habit and a taste for following, in their private actions, no other guide but their own will. This complete independence, which they constantly enjoy towards their equals and in the intercourse of private life, tends to make them look upon all authority with a jealous eye, and speedily suggests to them the notion and the love of political freedom. Men living at such times have a natural bias to free institutions. Take any one of them at a venture, and search if you can his most deep-seated instincts; and you will find that, of all governments, he will soonest conceive and most highly value that government whose head he has himself elected, and whose administration he may control.
Alexis de Tocqueville
While significant strides have been made in the pursuit of life expectancy, healthcare, educational opportunities, and constitutional protections for women, the Supreme Court, in particular, still wrestles with their status, as evidenced by their problems in pursuing equal opportunity in education and employment, reproductive freedom, the military, and violence against women.
David E. Wilkins
Every election is determined by the people who show up.
Larry J. Sabato
Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
To accuse nations (not leaders or governments) is the hallmark of the demo-nationalist of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; it leads to endless hatreds, feelings of revenge, misunderstandings, and frictions. It is the surest guarantee for perpetual mass wars.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Generals, on the average, are far less bellicose than journalists or patriotic housewives: They know the horrors of a war and they dislike any break in the routine
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.
Samuel P. Huntington
Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger
War made the state, and the state made war
Charles Tilly
Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.
Herbert A. Simon
Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.
Herbert A. Simon
I follow the course marked out by my principles and, what is more, enjoy a deep and noble pleasure in following it. You deeply despise the human race, at least our part of it; you think it not only fallen but incapable of ever rising again... For my part, as I feel neither the right nor the wish to entertain such opinions of my species and my country, I think it is not necessary to despair of them. In my opinion, human societies, like individuals, amount to something only in liberty...And God forbid that my mind should ever be crossed by the thought that it is necessary to despair of success... You will allow me to have less confidence in your teaching than in the goodness and justice of God.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I have the impression that our children are much more excited about going to school than children in other countries are. They think of it as a special privilege. Going to school, being with other children, getting books and pencils - all of that is like a dream for them.
Cheryl Benard
Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.
George Friedman
On close inspection, we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are out of their natural connections, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?
Alexis de Tocqueville
Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.
Norman G. Finkelstein
There is no such thing as a historical fatality there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die.
Alexis de Tocqueville
If there is no personal God,everything is permissablel, and if God exists,everthing is possible.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.
Robert W. Cox
I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.
Alexis de Tocqueville
History is a better guide than good intentions.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.
Norman G. Finkelstein
Identifying the flaw in the US philosophical roots requires that we move beyond the intellectual and emotional climate in which the Constitution was conceived and adopted. The meanings of concepts and words change with use, and even the Supreme Court has admitted that the original perspective of the American social contract has been altered by the passage of time.
David E. Wilkins
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Herbert Simon
Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.
Henry Kissinger
The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.
Kalu Ndukwe Kalu