Top 15 Joseph Nye Quotes

American political scientist

Add quote

Joseph Samuel Nye, Jr. (January 19, 1937 – May 6, 2025) was an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power and explained the distinction between it and hard power. His notion of "smart power" ("the ability to combine hard and soft power into a successful strategy") became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration. Nye was the former Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he held the position of University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus. In October 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Nye to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He was a member of the Harvard faculty since 1964. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a foreign fellow of The British Academy. He was also a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Joseph Samuel Nye Jr.

Alternative Names: Joseph Samuel Nye, Jr. • Joseph S. Nye, Jr. • Joseph S. Nye

From Wikidata (CC0)

The bipolar world is over, but it not going to be replaced by a unipolar world empire that the United States controls alone. The world is already economically multipolar, and there will be a diffusion of power as the information revolution progresses, interdependence increases, and transnational actors become more important. The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that.

If Thucydides were plopped down in the Middle East or East Asia, he would probably recognize ... the situation quite quickly.

Just as gunpowder and infantry penetrated and destroyed the medieval castle, so have nuclear missiles and the internet made the nation-state obsolete.

The territorial state has not always existed in the past, so it need not necessarily exist in the future.

Attention rather than information becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power.

Governments now have to share the stage with actors who can use information to enhance their soft power and press governments directly, or indirectly by mobilizing their publics.

Some economists believe that the Great Depression of the 1930s was aggravated by bad monetary policy and lack of American leadership. Britain was too weak to maintain an open international economy, and the United States was not living up to its new responsibilities.

When words are both descriptive and prescriptive, thyey become political words used in struggles for power.

The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it.

Some observers feel it is harder to change public opinion in democracies than it is to change policies in totalitarian countries.

Chamberlain's sins were not his intentions, but rather his ignorance and arrogance in failing to appraise the situation properly. And in that failure he was not alone.

Some say precipitating events are like buses - they come along every ten minutes.

Power conversion is the capacity to convert potential power, as measured by resources, to realized power, as measured by the changed behavior of others.

Power, like love, is easier to experience than to define or measure.

Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties.