Top 65 Political Theory Quotes
#1. Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.
Vivian Gornick
#2. The problem of political theory is how to combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress, with the degree of social cohesion which is necessary for survival.
Bertrand Russell
#3. The general point that a political theory is, among other things, a partisan intervention, is well taken. So question about the actual political implication of a theory cannot be excluded as, in principle, irrelevant.
Raymond Geuss
#4. Government in and of itself is the foremost agent for destroying order and imposing chaos."
"To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war."
"Political theory would be fine in a perfect world, but in an uncertain one, it is a dangerous gamble.
L.K. Samuels
#5. I was a man who was lucky enough to have discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool of Cuba's political crisis ... ; discovering Marxism ... was like finding a map in the forest.
Fidel Castro
#6. They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have boldly affirmed that 'one man is as good as another;' a maxim that is true in neither nature, revealed morals, nor political theory.
James F. Cooper
#7. If your political theory requires humanity to "evolve", then you do not have a theory.
A.E. Samaan
#8. Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.
Paul Johnson
#9. The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.
P.D. James
#10. When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.
Michael Sandel
#11. Christianity is not a political theory. It is not even a cultural theory. It is, at its root, all about changing the heart of each man and woman, boy and girl, so that we begin to think God's thoughts and act in accordance with his character.
Ravi Zacharias
#12. Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.
Subcomandante Marcos Laura Castellanos
#13. A political theory seeks to find from history the limits of the politically possible.
Francis Parker Yockey
#14. In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.
Simon Schama
#15. Internationalism is a social and political theory, a certain concept of how human society ought to be organized, and in particular a concept of how the nations ought to organize their mutual relations.
Christian Lous Lange
#16. Equality is a political theory not a practical policy ...
P.D. James
#17. Healing of the world's woes will not come through this or that social or political theory; not through violent changes in government, but in the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart.
Arthur James Moore
#18. For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.'
Emma Watson
#19. We are all born to love people and use things. Unfortunately, we grow to love things and use people ...
T. Rafael Cimino
#20. Often GOP political strategy seems like the human wave theory of the Chinese military translated to politics. Where Beijing uses masses of soldiers to overwhelm their adversaries, the GOP uses huge campaign budgets as a substitute for strategy, thought or issues.
Dick Morris
#21. Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth, and wealth again; wealth not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim.
Friedrich Engels
#22. The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts - and not absolute and general.
Jiang Zemin
#23. I had this terrible nightmare; I dreamt I was a politician and they were dragging me off to parliament
Rassool Jibraeel Snyman
#24. If you take Darwinian theory, make a 'scientific' principle out of it, put it into political action, then you have something like Nazi Germany.
Bruce Lipton
#25. Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory ...
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
#26. Anarchism is a theory of political science and is opposed to government in the political sense.
Steven T. Byington
#27. Political philosophy reaches for the best regime, a regime so good that it can hardly exist. Political science advances a theory - in fact, a number of theories - that promises to bring agreement and put an end to partisan dispute.
Harvey Mansfield
#28. If you are a leader or someone who works for the interest of a community, first make sure that you understand the interest of the people who make up that community. In this way, you will have a good chance of minimizing, perhaps, avoiding the us versus them mentality.
Duop Chak Wuol
#30. The fundamental religious objection to the theory of evolution is not scientific but moral. [Fundamentalists believe that] evolutionary theory must be opposed because it leads to rampant immorality, on both the personal and political scales. The basic cause of this immorality is atheism.
Elizabeth S. Anderson
#31. Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.
Murray Rothbard
#32. Commodity exchanges have a lot of advantages. One, you are helping transparency. Two, they are not political. It's institutional building. It can survive any environment, in theory.
Nicolas Berggruen
#33. The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz.
Gary Wolf
#34. We must consider not only why the classical theory of democracy appears to be in contradiction with the observed practice, but also why the many different responses to this observation, though mutually incompatible, all share the belief that democracy is the best form of political organization.
Moses Finley
#35. Political correctness is a war on noticing.
Steve Sailer
#36. Though I admire republican principles in theory, yet I am afraid the practice may be too perfect for human nature. We tried a republic last century, and it failed. Let our enemies try next. I hate political experiments.
Robert Walpole
#37. We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.
B.W. Powe
#38. I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#39. Vietnam was a lie but at least there was a political agenda. It was the domino theory. Iraq is about nothing but George Bush's ego laced with imperialist ambitions. And it was helped by your government.
Donald Sutherland
#40. Libertarianism is a theory of politics that is so compelling that once you have absorbed it, it becomes the lens through which you end up understanding all economic and political events.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#41. In theory man is put at the center of everything but in practice he is barely allowed to sit on the sidelines
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#42. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
Carl Schmitt
#43. Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle.
Louis Althusser
#44. In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.
Robert Caro
#45. No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement.
Mao Zedong
#46. We must abandon definitely the laissez-faire theory of political economy, and fearlessly champion a system of increased Governmental control, paying no heed to the cries of the worthy people who denounce this as Socialistic.
Theodore Roosevelt
#47. Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.
Noam Chomsky
#48. An animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#49. A mother was thinking of how to keep her naughty child in line she tried using the boogey man it didn't work ... she thought and thought then said "the Politician is going to get you" and he was never naughty again
Rassool Jibraeel Snyman
#50. Something foreign is always living itself through you. Your whole life is the vehicle for something to come to earth An evil spirit. A theory. A
marketing campaign. A political strategy. A religious doctrine.
Chuck Palahniuk
#51. Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions - political, economic,
psychological, military - that aims at the overthrow of the established
authority in a country and its replacement by another regime.
Roger Trinquier
#52. There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#53. The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.
Bernard Bailyn
#54. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.
Kwame Nkrumah
#55. My theory is this; I'm not a political songwriter. I'm an honest songwriter.
Billy Bragg
#56. Republican theory clearly stated that the people held all political power, and only they could delegate authority to a government. The people were free to change governments at will. They didn't need permission from incumbents.
James D. Best
#57. We must endure the ignorant to protect the liberty of the majority.
James D. Best
#58. I'm beginning to view democracy as the Siri of political systems. So much better in theory.
Rob Thomas
#59. Intellectuals ... advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall ... It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.
Allan Bloom
#60. Just read the farm relief bill. It's just a political version of Einstein's last theory. If a farmer could understand it, he certainly would know more than to farm. He would be a professor at Harvard.
Will Rogers
#61. The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.
Glenn Greenwald
#62. If Marxist theory dictates that the personal is always political, the rebuttal of both 'The Americans' and 'House of Cards' is that the political is always personal: the sum total of our collective needs and desires, vows and betrayals.
Steve Erickson
#63. Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxims, Laissez-faire and 'Pas trop gouverner' are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least.
George Fitzhugh
#64. I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.
Pankaj Mishra
#65. Contrary to conventional military and game theory, the most effective offense is sometimes a direct attack against your political opponent's greatest strength - not his weaknesses - to place him immediately on the defensive.
Mark McKinnon
