Alan Wolfe Quotes

United States, Scientist
June 10, 1942

Alan Wolfe is a political scientist and a sociologist on the faculty of Boston College who serves as director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of American Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation in partnership with Yale University Press and the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, "dedicated to research and education aimed at renewing and sustaining the historic vision of American democracy".

Also known as Sociologist

Iraq failed for the same reasons that all conservative public policy efforts fail. Refusing to acknowledge the importance of government while relying on it to achieve your objectives causes the same kind of chaos in foreign policy that it does in matters closer to home.

Alan Wolfe
- Government
- Policy
- Iraq
We ought to be more focused on enemies without than preoccupied with finding them within.

Alan Wolfe
- Enemies
- Finding
- Within

To teach kids that creationism explains something about the world is no different than teaching them that the earth is flat.

Alan Wolfe
- Kids
- Teach
We're willing to move pretty far on this issue, we're much more tolerant than we used to be, but don't mix it up with religion and God.

Alan Wolfe
- Used
- Move
- Issue
If once in America the question of religious toleration was raised in defense of nonbelievers who dissented from religious orthodoxy, today it is raised by believers who feel excluded from a predominantly secular public world.

Alan Wolfe
Like other German theorists of the state, Carl Schmitt held to the idea that politics is always about violence; if we really and truly disagree with other people, we ought to treat them as enemies. Fish does not follow Schmitt this far. To be sure, he fills his books with examples of people who ought to, and usually do, hate each other: secular liberals dealing with religious fundamentalists; full-stop opponents of affirmative action confronting those who support it; defenders of speech codes and critics of hate-crime laws.

Alan Wolfe
- Violence
- Books
- Enemies
In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture -and American culture has triumphed.

Alan Wolfe
- American
- Culture
- Faith
Carl Schmitt in theory is one thing; confined to a few conservatives on the right and a somewhat greater number of envious postmodernists on the left, Schmitt’s ideas have not reached the informed reading public. Schmitt’s books are destined to be confined to the political theory sem inar room for some time to come.

Alan Wolfe
- Books
- Theory
- Schmitt

Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

Alan Wolfe
- Wrong
- Well
- Govern