Top 40 Francis Fukuyama Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means. This legal apparatus, serving as a substitute for trust, entails what economists call “transaction costs.” Widespread distrust in a society, in other words, imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay.”

— Francis Fukuyama

2. “Thymos is the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity; isothymia is the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people; while megalothymia is the desire to be recognized as superior.”

— Francis Fukuyama

3. “The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.”

— Francis Fukuyama

4. “In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmatic agenda.”

— Francis Fukuyama

5. “National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict.”

— Francis Fukuyama

6. “It was the slave’s continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master.”

— Francis Fukuyama

7. “Human beings are rule-following animals by nature; they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value. When the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs. Those institutions are supported by legions of entrenched stakeholders who oppose any fundamental change.”

— Francis Fukuyama

8. “The desire for economic prosperity is itself not culturally determined but almost universally shared.”

— Francis Fukuyama

9. “To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard.”

— Francis Fukuyama

10. “Most people living in rich, stable developed countries have no idea how Denmark itself got to be Denmark – something that is true for many Danes as well. The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place.”

— Francis Fukuyama

11. “While the economic inequalities arising from the last fifty or so years of globalization are a major factor explaining contemporary politics, economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect. Indeed, much of what we understand to be economic motivation actually reflects not a straightforward desire for wealth and resources, but the fact that money is perceived to be a marker of status and buys respect.”

— Francis Fukuyama

12. “The type of identity politics increasingly practiced on both the left and the right is deeply problematic because it returns to understandings of identity based on fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and religion, which had earlier been defeated at great cost.”

— Francis Fukuyama

13. “Most human beings, in other words, would rather fight than starve.19.”

— Francis Fukuyama

14. “Men are made unhappy not because they fail to gratify some fixed set of desires, but by the gap that continually arises between new wants and their fulfillment.”

— Francis Fukuyama

15. “In the future the optimal form of industrial organization will be neither small companies nor large ones but network structures that share the advantages of both.”

— Francis Fukuyama

16. “For capitalism flourishes best in a mobile and egalitarian society.”

— Francis Fukuyama

17. “The experience of the twentieth century made highly problematic the claims of progress on the basis of science and technology. For the ability of technology to better human life is critically dependent on a parallel moral progress in man. Without the latter, the power of technology will simply be turned to evil purposes, and mankind will be worse off than it was previously.”

— Francis Fukuyama

18. “The problem, however, was not with the idea of national identity itself; the problem was the narrow, ethnically based, intolerant, aggressive, and deeply illiberal form that national identity took.”

— Francis Fukuyama

19. “Human beings cooperate to compete, and they compete to cooperate. The birth of the Leviathan did not permanently solve the problem of violence; it simply moved it to a higher level.”

— Francis Fukuyama

20. “The politics of recognition and dignity had reached a fork by the early nineteenth century. One fork led to the universal recognition of individual rights, and thence to liberal societies that sought to provide citizens with an ever-expanding scope of individual autonomy. The other fork led to assertions of collective identity, of which the two major manifestations were nationalism and politicized religion.”

— Francis Fukuyama

21. “Inflation via loose monetary policy is in effect a tax, but one that does not have to be legislated and that tends to hurt ordinary people more than elites with real rather than monetary assets.”

— Francis Fukuyama

22. “Economic activity is carried out by individuals in organisations that require a high degree of social co-operation.”

— Francis Fukuyama

23. “While classical liberalism sought to protect the autonomy of equal individuals, the new ideology of multiculturalism promoted equal respect for cultures, even if those cultures abridged the autonomy of the individuals who participated in them.”

— Francis Fukuyama

24. “The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible.”

— Francis Fukuyama

25. “When liberal democracies work well, state, law, and accountability all reinforce one another.”

— Francis Fukuyama

26. “Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google’s computers; the Osama bin Laden people can’t make their underwear blow up.”

— Francis Fukuyama

27. “When the middle class constitutes only 20–30 percent of the population, it may side with antidemocratic forces because it fears the intentions of the large mass of poor people below it and the populist policies they may pursue.”

— Francis Fukuyama

28. “The obligation to respect universal human rights has been voluntarily undertaken by most countries around the world, and rightly so. But all liberal democracies are built on top of states, whose jurisdiction is limited by their territorial reach. No state can undertake an unlimited obligation to protect people outside its jurisdiction, and whether the world would be better off if they all tried to do so is not clear.”

— Francis Fukuyama

29. “The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups.”

— Francis Fukuyama

30. “The shift in agendas of both left and right toward the protection of ever narrower group identities ultimately threatens the possibility of communication and collective action.”

— Francis Fukuyama

31. “The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government.”

— Francis Fukuyama

32. “Political liberty – that is, the ability of societies to rule themselves – does not depend only on the degree to which a society can mobilize opposition to centralized power and impose constitutional constraints on the state. It must also have a state that is strong enough to act when action is required.”

— Francis Fukuyama

33. “In China, once collective farms were disbanded in 1978 under the leadership of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, agricultural output doubled in the space of just four years. A.”

— Francis Fukuyama

34. “China is never going to be a global model. Western system is really broken in some fundamental ways, but the Chinese system is not going to work either. It is a deeply unfair and immoral system where everything can be taken away from anyone in a split second.”

— Francis Fukuyama

35. “For Nietzsche, the very essence of man was neither his desire nor his reason, but his thymos: man was above all a valuing creature, the “beast with red cheeks” who found life in his ability to pronounce the words “good” and “evil.”

— Francis Fukuyama

36. “But as important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the disparate events of the present. This might be called the politics of resentment. In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question.”

— Francis Fukuyama

37. “As a result of their own experience in a country with historical social mobility, American policy makers are often blind to deeply embedded social stratifications that characterize other societies. The only successful political revolution in the western hemisphere that also resulted in a social revolution was that of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1959, a revolution that the United States spent the next fifty-plus years trying to contain or reverse.”

— Francis Fukuyama

38. “According to the historian John LeDonne, “The existence of a national network of families and client systems made a mockery of the rigid hierarchy established by legislative texts in a constant search for administrative order and ‘regularity.’ It explained why the Russian government, more than any other, was a government of men and not of laws.”28.”

— Francis Fukuyama

39. “But the simple availability of information about corruption tends not to produce genuine accountability because the politically active part of the population are members of clientelistic networks.”

— Francis Fukuyama

40. “The only part of the world where tribalism was fully superseded by more voluntary and individualistic forms of social relationship was Europe, where Christianity played a decisive role in undermining kinship as a basis for social cohesion.”

— Francis Fukuyama

41. “It is interesting to speculate whether commercial capitalism was thereby smothered in its crib in Egypt, just at a moment when it was beginning to take off in other places such as Italy, the Netherlands, and England.24 On.”

— Francis Fukuyama

42. “Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.”

— Francis Fukuyama

43. “On the left, identity politics has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender discrimination, and other forms of systematic exclusion are somehow intrinsic to the country’s DNA.”

— Francis Fukuyama

44. “A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous “wisdom of crowds” are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that “institutions matter”: poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions. We need therefore to better understand where those institutions come from.”

— Francis Fukuyama

45. “Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews have argued that one of the big problems with developing countries’ governments is that they engage in what they term “isomorphic mimicry,” that is, copying the outward forms of developed countries’ governments, while being unable to reproduce the kinds of outputs, like education and health, that the latter achieve.”

— Francis Fukuyama

46. “Kant picked up on Rousseau’s idea of perfectibility, and turned it into the core of his moral philosophy. At the beginning of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says that the only thing that is unconditionally good is a good will, and that the capacity to make moral choices is what makes us distinctively human. Human beings are ends in themselves and should never be treated as a means to other ends.”

— Francis Fukuyama

47. “Interstate wars in Latin America have been so infrequent and politically unimportant that many major surveys of Latin American history barely cover them. Compared to Europe and ancient China, or indeed North America, war had a marginal effect on state building. Charles Tilly’s aphorism “war made the state, and the state made war” remains true, but begs the question of why wars are more prevalent in some regions than in others.”

— Francis Fukuyama

48. “Whether or not true free will exists, virtually all human beings act as if it does, and evaluate each other on the basis of their ability to make what they believe to be genuine moral choices.”

— Francis Fukuyama