Samuel P. Huntington Quotes

Fascism and communism have not entirely disappeared but have been sidelined certainly, and liberal democracy has come to be accepted, in theory at least, around the world, if not always in practice.

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.

I was a right winger into the 70's but I left the right in late 70's.

It is one of the truisms of politics that a conservative is often enough a former liberal who has been 'mugged by reality.'

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.

I like to say now that the reason I'm conservative is because I used to be a liberal, and I learned a lot.

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

[C]ontemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideas integral to the larger fascist movement.

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.

Even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror.

As long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period... Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression - and this is valid for South America - is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government.

The world has witnessed the rise and fall of monarchy, the rise and fall of dictatorship, the rise and fall of feudalism, the rise and fall of communism, and the rise of democracy; and now we are witnessing the fall of democracy... the theme of the evolution of life continues, sweeping away with it all that does not blossom into perfection.

Politics is an obsolete way of doing things. Although it was good a hundred years ago, it has no place in today's high tech society.

You cannot apply your high standards to a country [Egypt] burdened with decades of autocratic rule. Our democracy is still in its infancy.

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

A difficult regional situation doesn't justify one man's determination to hold onto power. It's clear to me that democratization is a very complicated process.

The Germans should be the first to sympathize with us [Egyptians]. They know how difficult it is to build a democracy following a dictatorship, and they were the first to be critical of Morsi's anti-democratic policies.

If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.

There is no more dramatic proof of the death of the Left than the passage of its central vision - global democratic revolution - into the hands of those who call themselves conservatives.

If democracy succeeds in Egypt, other countries will follow. Should the democratic experiment in Egypt be hijacked by the military or anti-democratic Islamist groups, the revolution will fail elsewhere.

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.

We need a new political science for a new world.

Are our competitors - for example, China, which is a deeply authoritarian nation - becoming more authoritarian or more liberal over time?