Political Theory Quotes

• A political theory seeks to find from history the limits of the politically possible

  Francis Parker Yockey

  Political, Limits, Theory

  Francis Parker Yockey (2013). “Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics”, p.283, The Palingenesis Project (Wermod and Wermod Publishing Group)

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• The gift of truth excels all other gifts.

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Truth, Philosophy

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• All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Differences, Civilization, Political

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Part I: "The Value of Freedom". Chapter 2: "The Creative Power of a Free Civilization", 1960.

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• 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

  Art, Science, Political

  Vivian Gornick (2013). “Women in Science: Then and Now”, p.53, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.

  P. D. James

  Political, Theory, Practicals

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• 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

  Men, Political, Maps

  "Castro in quotes", www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2008.

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• All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Wisdom, Political, Ignorant

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Part I: "The Value of Freedom". Chapter 2: "The Creative Power of a Free Civilization", 1960.

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• There was a time, before I was in graduate school, when political philosophy pretty much ceased to exist. The positivists thought there were only two things you could do: conceptual analysis or empirical investigation. Any kind of political theory or even ethical theory was nonsense.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Philosophy, School, Two

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again.

  Albert J. Nock

  Agency, Government, Years

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• 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

  Taken, Political, Principles

  "Philosophy and Real Politics". Book by Raymond Geuss, 2008.

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• 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

  Political, Social, Certain

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• Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura's version of political theory.

  Yukio Mishima

  Sweet, Hands, Long

  Yukio Mishima (1990). “Spring Snow”, Vintage

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• The southern German has the imagination and emotionality to subscribe to a fanatic ideology, but he is ordinarily inhibited from excesses by his natural humaneness. The Prussian does not have the imagination to conceive in terms of abstract racial and political theories, but when he is told to do something, he does it.

  Arthur Seyss-Inquart

  Imagination, Southern, Political

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• 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

  Men, Political, Feelings

  "The American Democrat: Or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America". Book by James F. Cooper, 1838.

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• Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity-my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm.

  Joseph Campbell

  Art, Space, Political

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• 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

  Congratulations, Exercise, Self

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• The government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of the human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Government, Political, Quality

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• Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.

  Paul Johnson

  Political, Action, Global Warming

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• Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Names, Interesting, Political

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• 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

  Healing, Heart, Government

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• It is a mistake to think of these men as visionary dreamers, playing around at Philadelphia with abstract conceptions of political theory, pulling a whole scheme of government out of the air like a rabbit out of a hat. True, many of them had read and studied enough about the science of politics to put the average statesman of today to shame. But political science was to them an extremely practical topic of discussion, dealing with the extremely practical business of running a government--not, as today, a branch of higher learning reserved for the use of graduate students.

  Fred Rodell

  Running, Mistake, Men

  Fred Rodell (1986). “55 Men, Story of Constitution”, p.22, Stackpole Books

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• I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .

  Hannah Arendt

  Gratitude, Book, Years

  Hannah Arendt (1992). “Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926-1969”, Harcourt

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• 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

  Design, Political, Back When

  "'Whether we are arguing about MPs' expenses or assisted suicide, we need to engage with the moral ideals underlying our political debates'". Interview with Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. October 30, 2009.

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• Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners.

  Geoffrey Miller

  Philosophy, Issues, Rights

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• The Americans of 1776 were among the first men in modern society to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty.... Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory sits in its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past.

  Clinton Rossiter

  Past, Men, America

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