John Harsanyi Quotes

Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

My students often ask me, 'What is sociology?' And I tell them, 'It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see.'

I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.

It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge.

Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.

If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.

I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.'

Every human creative endeavor is subject to mathematical law that you’re not always going to be right all the time.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

It’s very hard to predict the weather. Predicting human affairs is very difficult.

People look for an edge in an uncertain world.

Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake.

Economic theory does not work with human beings. We are far too messy.

There are two kinds of economists in the world. Those who don't know the future and those who don't know that they don't know the future.

I recognized that … there was a science of society as well as botany.

We liked to think that polling and political analysis had become scientific, but this campaign changes all that.

I connect with just plain old everyday people. Human behavior fascinates me, the people who are the nuts and bolts of this country who help hold up the world.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that.

The principles and passions of men are always the same and lead to the same result, varying only according to the circumstances in which they are placed.

People love drama. They feed off of it.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

One of my pleasures is observing people's behavior and pointing out the inconsistencies that we all sort of have at the center of our lives.

Researchers have always tried to use psychology for predictive ends: Can what we already know about a person tell us how she will behave in a given situation? The results of these endeavors have been mixed.

You learn a lot about human nature in a bar.