Top 42 Francis Fukuyama Quotes
#1. It is interesting to speculate whether commercial capitalism was thereby smothered in its crib in Egypt, just at a moment when it was beginning to take off in other places such as Italy, the Netherlands, and England.24 On
Francis Fukuyama
#2. The rule of law is critical for economic development; without clear property rights and contract enforcement, it is difficult for businesses to break out of small circles of trust.
Francis Fukuyama
#3. A high degree of autonomy is what permits innovation, experimentation and risk taking in a bureaucracy. If the slightest mistake can end a career, then no one will ever take risks.
Francis Fukuyama
#4. in cold countries they have very little sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they have more; in warm countries, their sensibility is exquisite.
Francis Fukuyama
#5. I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way.
Francis Fukuyama
#6. It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master
Francis Fukuyama
#7. The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.
Francis Fukuyama
#8. Putting one's parents out to pasture in a nursing home has very deep historical roots in Western Europe.
Francis Fukuyama
#9. For capitalism flourishes best in a mobile and egalitarian society
Francis Fukuyama
#10. If people who have to work together in an enterprise trust one another it is because they are all operating to a common set of ethical norms ... such a society will be better able to innovate ... since the high degree of trust will permit a wide variety of social relationships to emerge ...
Francis Fukuyama
#11. The desire for economic prosperity is itself not culturally determined but almost universally shared
Francis Fukuyama
#12. Economic activity is carried out by individuals in organisations that require a high degree of social co-operation
Francis Fukuyama
#13. National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict.
Francis Fukuyama
#14. From the earlier discussion of Europe in the nineteenth century, however, it should be clear that the middle classes are not inevitably supporters of democracy. This tends to be particularly true when the middle classes still constitute a minority of the population.
Francis Fukuyama
#15. Neoclassical economics ... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time.
Francis Fukuyama
#16. I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.
Francis Fukuyama
#17. men had been everywhere and had seen everything, life's greatest experience had ended with most of life still to be lived, to find common purpose in the quiet days of peace would be hard
Francis Fukuyama
#18. China is never going to be a global model. Western system is really broken in some fundamental ways, but the Chinese system is not going to work either. It is a deeply unfair and immoral system where everything can be taken away from anyone in a split second.
Francis Fukuyama
#19. The repeated demand for "justice," incorporated into the names of many Islamist parties, reflects not so much a demand for social equality as a demand for equal treatment under the law.
Francis Fukuyama
#20. Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions.
Francis Fukuyama
#21. To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard
Francis Fukuyama
#22. The degree to which people in developed countries take political institutions for granted was very much evident in the way that the United States planned, or failed to plan, for the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Francis Fukuyama
#24. I THE IDEA OF TRUST The Improbable Power of Culture in the Making of Economic Society
Francis Fukuyama
#25. But we forget that government was also created to act and make decisions.
Francis Fukuyama
#26. When a rural Greek is hospitalized, relatives are in constant attendance to keep a check on the doctor and the treatment he prescribes.
Francis Fukuyama
#27. In general, Americans are not very good at nation-building and not very good colonialists.
Francis Fukuyama
#28. Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other.
Francis Fukuyama
#29. If networks are to be more efficient ... this will come about only on the basis of a high level of trust and the existence of shared norms of ethical behavior between network members
Francis Fukuyama
#30. When used as an instrument of enforcement, the courts have morphed from constraints on government to mechanisms by which the scope of government has enormously expanded.
Francis Fukuyama
#31. 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
#32. Europe's exhausted elites were ready to concede both liberal democracy and redistributive welfare states to ensure social peace.
Francis Fukuyama
#33. Perhaps when you're young you think that something must be profound just because it is difficult and you don't have the self-confidence to say 'this is just nonsense
Francis Fukuyama
#34. Joseph Stalin was said to have contemptuously asked, "How many divisions has the pope?
Francis Fukuyama
#35. I've always had a Marxist understanding of history: democracy is a result of a broad modernization process that happens in every country. Neocons think the use of political power can force the pace of change, but ultimately it depends on societies doing it themselves.
Francis Fukuyama
#36. For Hegel, by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other
Francis Fukuyama
#37. Most human beings, in other words, would rather fight than starve.19
Francis Fukuyama
#38. However, neither rule of law nor political accountability exists in contemporary China any more than they did in dynastic China.
Francis Fukuyama
#39. In the future the optimal form of industrial organization will be neither small companies nor large ones but network structures that share the advantages of both.
Francis Fukuyama
#40. In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmatic agenda.
Francis Fukuyama
#41. The rule of law constitutes a basic protection of individuals against tyrannical government. But in the second half of the twentieth century, law lost its focus as a constraint on government and became instead an instrument for widening the scope of government.
Francis Fukuyama
#42. Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up.
Francis Fukuyama
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