These political science quotes will inspire you. Political science focuses on the theory and practice of government and politics at the local, state, national, and international levels.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging political science quotes, political science sayings, and political science proverbs.
Best Political Science Quotes
- “The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.” ~ Woodrow Wilson
- “I wanted to have a political career. I thought studying political science would be the best way to achieve it.” ~ Bianca Jagger
- “My father was my main influence. He was a preacher, but he was also a history and political science teacher, and since he was my hero, I wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a teacher.” ~ David Soul
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“I went to college at the University of Kansas, where I got a degree in political science.” ~ Sara Paretsky
- “My parents divorced when I was born, and my mother is a political science professor, like a feminist Mormon, which is sort of an oxymoron.” ~ Eliza Dushku
- “I was a Political Science major.” ~ Harry Shearer
- “I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science.” ~ Joe Biden
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“There is no question that Taiwan is a state in any political science definition of a state.” ~ William C. Kirby
- “From the standpoint of modern political science the slave holders were right in declaring that liberty can be given only to those who have political capacity enough to use it, and they were also right in maintaining that two greatly unequal races cannot exist side by side on terms of perfect equality.” ~ Charles Edward Merriam
- “The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.” ~ Mario Cuomo
- “People often of masterful intelligence, trained usually in law or economics or perhaps in political science, who have led their governments into disastrous decisions and miscalculations because they have no awareness whatever of the historical background, the cultural universe, of the foreign societies with which they have to deal.” ~ Michael Howard
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“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” ~ Plato
- “Political Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise.” ~ Giambattista Vico
- “Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” ~ Aristotle
- “A political philosophy (often called “political science” by practitioners who are not averse from verbal trickery) must deal with contemporary realities. If it does not, if it is charged with “ideals,” it is merely a variety of romantic fiction, although it may not be recognized as such.” ~ Revilo P. Oliver
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“We need a new political science for a new world.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
- “Shortly, the public will be unable to reason or think for themselves. They’ll only be able to parrot the information they’ve been given on the previous night’s news.” ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski
- “Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors — malleable entities like ethnicities, for example — are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.” ~ Ken Jennings
- “The Sanders campaign, however, broke dramatically with over a century of U.S. political history. Extensive political science research, notably the work of Thomas Ferguson, has shown convincingly that elections are pretty much bought. For example, campaign spending alone is a remarkably good predictor of electoral success, and support of corporate power and private wealth is a virtual prerequisite even for participation in the political arena.” ~ Noam Chomsky
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“So my degree was in political science, which I think was – the closest I could come to marketing is politics.” ~ Steve Case
- “Filmmaking became a possible way for me to combine my interest in photography and in gathering stories, as well as my interest in journalism and political science and international relations.” ~ Joshua Marston
- “I always had a respect and an admiration for people who got into politics. I certainly have always been interested in law and political science.” ~ Jay Roach
- “Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.” ~ Paul Wolfowitz
- “Culture as art is the peak expression of man’s creativity, his capacity to break out of nature’s narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.” ~ Allan Bloom
- “I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills’ research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science).” ~ Lloyd deMause
- “The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman. To most of us, the manipulative invoking of religion to advance a politician or a party is frightening and divisive. The American people will tolerate religious leaders taking positions for or against candidates.” ~ Mario Cuomo
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“I studied political science and international relations, so I never considered myself an artist.” ~ Philippe Falardeau
- “One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.” ~ Paul Wolfowitz
- “The Social Citizen is the best, most thorough, and most methodologically sophisticated treatment of the role of social networks in political behavior that I have ever read. Betsy Sinclair shows just how strongly we are influenced to express ourselves politically by our family, neighbors, and friends. We are on the verge of a sea change in political science, and this will be one of the most important books we refer to when we describe what happened to the discipline in the twenty-first century.” ~ James H. Fowler
- “Compare mathematics and the political sciences – it’s quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content.” ~ Noam Chomsky
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“Anarchism is a theory of political science and is opposed to government in the political sense.” ~ Steven T. Byington
- “A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end that is aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character.” ~ Aristotle
- “I studied political science and international relations and had the intention of becoming a journalist or work in foreign affairs. I had no intention of making a film.” ~ Philippe Falardeau
- “I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn’t worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn’t have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.” ~ Sheila Heti
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“I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality.” ~ Yukio Mishima
- “The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate.” ~ Edmund Burke
- “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
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“Yes, for my undergrad I majored in Criminal Justice and minored in Political Science and English.” ~ Matthew McGrory
- “There is no such thing as political science, but there are tenancies so strong that they might as well be called laws of nature.” ~ Jeff Greenfield
- “I didn’t understand how you could be an actor if you didn’t also study philosophy and study political science, astronomy. And also just go out and live life and have experiences.” ~ Brit Marling
- “Rod Clark has one of the most unique voices I have ever encountered. I still quote some of his political insights years later. To have him write political science fiction is both appropriate and intriguing.” ~ Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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“I majored in political science, and my concentration was U.S. involvement in Latin America in the 20th century.” ~ Sebastian Arcelus
- “It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the sole means of neutralizing the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
- “I wanted to be a political science professor and go to school in Boston. I never wanted to be a big, famous movie star and TV star. It kind of found me.” ~ Eliza Dushku
- “Whether moral and social phenomena are really exceptions to the general certainty and uniformity of the course of nature; and how far the methods, by which so many of the laws of the physical world have been numbered among truths irrevocably acquired and universally assented to, can be made instrumental to the gradual formation of a similar body of received doctrine in moral and political science.” ~ John Stuart Mill
- “Teaching was my transition from student life to working life. In those days, our system of education was a little different. The number of students in each class was huge. I think in political science general, which I taught, it was around 100.” ~ Pranab Mukherjee
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“I had two different degrees: One in International Relations/Political Science and another degree in Radio and Television Production.” ~ Hannah Simone
- “If I say I am not a politician, it is because I did not go to school to do political science. But at the end of the day, I think we are all born politicians. It’s practical. All you gotta do is practice.” ~ George Weah
- “Our accent will be upon youth: we need new ideas, new methods, new approaches. We will call upon young students of political science throughout the nation to help us. We will encourage these young students to launch their own independent study, and then give us their analysis and their suggestions. We are completely disenchanted with the old, adult, established politicians. We want to see some new faces — more militant faces.” ~ Malcolm X
- “Ever read any [Friedrich] Hayek? He’s great. The Road To Serfdom is like… I’m not a big political-science reader, but I actually dog-eared my copy. I ended up going back through it and writing a précis, I was so impressed by this book. It’s all about what happens when government tries to make everything right.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“Today, I think, the state of philosophizing about democracy is very healthy. It bridges political science and philosophy, as it should.” ~ Martha C. Nussbaum
- “Foreign policy is now a huge field. It isn’t just people who are studying political science. There are so many aspects to it in terms of understanding hard science for people who are studying climate change, or people who are interested in health policy or food security, or people who care about education.” ~ Madeleine Albright
- “People used to complain in the 50s and 60s and even in the 70s when I was in school, studying political science, that “if only we could have two political parties that presented a choice, but there were all these liberal Republicans and there were all these southern Democrats who are conservative so people just don’t have a clear choice.”” ~ William Kristol
- “Chairman Mao creatively applied Marxism-Leninism to every aspect of the Chinese revolution, and he had creative views on philosophy, political science, military science, literature and art, and so on. Unfortunately, in the evening of his life, particularly during the “Cultural Revolution”, he made mistakes – and they were not minor ones – which brought many misfortunes upon our Party, our state and our people.” ~ Deng Xiaoping
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“For a member to say, ‘I’m a lame duck’ violates political science 101.” ~ Charles Rangel
- “No kid graduating in a political science class in Canada should not understand what’s happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It’s the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies.” ~ Michael Ignatieff
- “Going back to why people don’t vote, I presume the main reason is because they understand without reading political science texts that it doesn’t make any difference how they vote. It’s not going to affect policy, so why bother?” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “We don’t gaze into a crystal ball. I do not believe that we predict things. I think political science is bad at prediction. I think what we really do well is in a number of instances where politics matters, we can do a better job of tell you what is happening now, than other people. So, we can look at Syria today. We can look at the Eurozone today. And we can look at areas where politics is a driver and we can give you a pretty good sense in those areas of here is how to understand today.” ~ Ian Bremmer
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“Part of me wanted to get a graduate degree in political science. Had I done that, I suppose I would have become a college professor.” ~ Samuel Alito
- “You gather a certain number of people around you but, you know, they look – they look – they didn’t look to me like people who were, you know, carefully studying political science and were all upset about the ideology of the election.” ~ Rudy Giuliani
- “I began a conversation with the heads of our esteemed department of political science, and instantly I concluded, ‘Hopelessly incompetent!” ~ Ira Carmen
- “Running for office was definitely something I’ve thought about. When I was younger, I wanted to major in political science. And I’ve been engaged in current events since I was a kid. If I can make a difference and feel passionately and capable, then I would. Why not?” ~ Queen Latifah
