100 famous quotes in political theory

100 famous quotes in political theory

Classical Political Thought (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau)

1. Plato – “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
2. Plato – “Until philosophers become kings… cities will never have rest from their evils.”
3. Aristotle – “Man is by nature a political animal.”
4. Aristotle – “Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects.”
5. Niccolò Machiavelli – “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
6. Machiavelli – “Politics have no relation to morals.”
7. Thomas Hobbes – “The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”
8. Hobbes – “Without government, life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
9. John Locke – “Where there is no law, there is no freedom.”
10. Locke – “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”
11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
12. Rousseau – “The strongest is never strong enough to always be the master, unless he transforms force into right.”

🔹 Liberalism & Democracy (Mill, Tocqueville, Rawls, Hayek, Sen, Arendt)

13. John Stuart Mill – “The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”
14. Mill – “Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”
15. Alexis de Tocqueville – “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom.”
16. Tocqueville – “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”
17. John Rawls – “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”
18. Rawls – “A society is well-ordered when it is designed to advance the good of its members.”
19. Friedrich Hayek – “A free society needs limited government.”
20. Hayek – “Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”
21. Amartya Sen – “Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is a lack of capability.”
22. Hannah Arendt – “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
23. Arendt – “The freedom to be free is the freedom to begin.”

🔹 Marxism & Critical Theory (Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Adorno, Habermas)

24. Karl Marx – “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
25. Marx – “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
26. Friedrich Engels – “The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression.”
27. Antonio Gramsci – “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.”
28. Gramsci – “Hegemony is the cultural domination of one group over another.”
29. Theodor Adorno – “Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”
30. Jürgen Habermas – “Democracy depends on an active and critical public sphere.”

🔹 Power & Governance (Weber, Schmitt, Foucault, Agamben)

31. Max Weber – “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”
32. Weber – “The state is the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.”
33. Carl Schmitt – “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
34. Michel Foucault – “Power is not an institution, nor a structure; it is the name we give to a complex strategic situation.”
35. Foucault – “Freedom is nothing but the correlative of discipline.”
36. Giorgio Agamben – “The state of exception tends to become the rule.”

🔹 Feminist & Postcolonial Thought (de Beauvoir, Spivak, Said, Fanon)

37. Simone de Beauvoir – “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
38. Gayatri Spivak – “Can the subaltern speak?”
39. Edward Said – “Every empire tells itself that it is unlike all other empires.”
40. Frantz Fanon – “The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”

🔹 Populism & Political Change (Laclau, Mouffe, Fukuyama, Huntington)

41. Ernesto Laclau – “Populism is a way of constructing the political.”
42. Chantal Mouffe – “Democracy should embrace conflict rather than eliminate it.”
43. Francis Fukuyama – “Liberal democracy is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”
44. Samuel Huntington – “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”

🔹 Anarchism & Revolutionary Thought (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Zapatistas, Zizek)

45. Mikhail Bakunin – “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”
46. Peter Kropotkin – “Mutual aid is the foundation of society.”
47. Zapatista Manifesto – “Everything for everyone, nothing for us.”
48. Slavoj Žižek – “The ultimate illusion of democracy is that it is democratic.”

🔹 Modern Challenges (Zuboff, Mbembe, Rosa, Chomsky)

49. Shoshana Zuboff – “Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy.”
50. Achille Mbembe – “Necropolitics decides who may live and who must die.”
51. Hartmut Rosa – “Modernity is driven by acceleration.”
52. Noam Chomsky – “The smart way to keep people passive is to limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion.”

🔹 Contemporary Political Theory & Ideologies

53. Michel Foucault – “Where there is power, there is resistance.”
54. Antonio Gramsci – “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
55. Hannah Arendt – “The most important precondition of politics is the ability to act.”
56. John Rawls – “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.”
57. Jean Baudrillard – “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
58. Chantal Mouffe – “We must affirm that democracy is a permanent conflict.”
59. Jürgen Habermas – “The communicative power is the power of reason to shape reality.”
60. Zygmunt Bauman – “In liquid modernity, people live in a constant state of uncertainty.”

🔹 Environmental & Global Political Thought (Chakrabarty, Klein, Hardt, Negri)

61. Dipesh Chakrabarty – “The Anthropocene demands that we rethink the very terms of human existence.”
62. Naomi Klein – “The climate crisis is also a crisis of capitalism.”
63. Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri – “Empire is not a state, it is a new global order.”
64. Naomi Klein – “Climate change is the ultimate ‘externality’ – one that can no longer be ignored.”

🔹 Technology & Surveillance (Zuboff, Foucault, Castells, Arendt)

65. Shoshana Zuboff – “Surveillance capitalism is the new form of power.”
66. Michel Foucault – “Surveillance is the most effective form of power.”
67. Manuel Castells – “The new power is the power of networks, not institutions.”
68. Hannah Arendt – “The rise of totalitarianism is rooted in the breakdown of traditional forms of authority.”

🔹 Justice & Equality (Sen, Rawls, Marx, Nozick, Berlin)

69. Amartya Sen – “Justice requires the removal of unfreedoms that prevent people from realizing their potential.”
70. John Rawls – “Injustice is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all.”
71. Karl Marx – “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
72. Robert Nozick – “Liberty upsets patterns.”
73. Isaiah Berlin – “Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows.”

🔹 Authoritarianism & Totalitarianism (Orwell, Arendt, Schmitt)

74. George Orwell – “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
75. Orwell – “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
76. Hannah Arendt – “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
77. Carl Schmitt – “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

🔹 Freedom, Identity, and Subjectivity (Butler, Beauvoir, Fanon)

78. Judith Butler – “Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does.”
79. Simone de Beauvoir – “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
80. Frantz Fanon – “The colonized is always described in terms of what he lacks.”
81. Slavoj Žižek – “Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”

🔹 Globalization & Geopolitics (Klein, Fukuyama, Huntington)

82. Naomi Klein – “The idea that there is no alternative to capitalism is an ideological construct.”
83. Francis Fukuyama – “The end of history will be a state of permanent peace.”
84. Samuel Huntington – “The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.”

🔹 Democratic Theory (Schumpeter, Habermas, Rawls)

85. Joseph Schumpeter – “Democracy is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”
86. Jürgen Habermas – “In democratic societies, the people should have the final say on issues that concern them.”
87. John Rawls – “A just society is one in which individuals are treated as equals.”

🔹 Contemporary Political Philosophy (Agamben, Foucault, Badiou)

88. Giorgio Agamben – “The state of exception is becoming the rule.”
89. Michel Foucault – “What makes power relations so insidious is that they are not just imposed from above, they are negotiated in daily interactions.”
90. Alain Badiou – “The political is not a matter of consensus, but of a rupture with the status quo.”

🔹 Political Revolution & Change (Marx, Arendt, Zizek)

91. Karl Marx – “The revolution is the locomotive of history.”
92. Hannah Arendt – “The most important precondition of politics is the ability to act.”
93. Slavoj Žižek – “The ultimate illusion of democracy is that it is democratic.”

🔹 Global Justice & Ethics (Sen, Pogge, Nussbaum)

94. Amartya Sen – “Development is freedom.”
95. Thomas Pogge – “The rich world’s disregard for the poor is a moral scandal.”
96. Martha Nussbaum – “Justice requires the creation of opportunities for every