Chiar la începutul romanului său Anna Karenina, Tolstoi afirmă că toate familiile fericite se aseamănă între ele, în timp ce nefericirea este diversă, fiecare familie fiind nefericită în felul său. Frumos! Dar nu mi-am pus niciodată întrebarea dacă este şi adevărat. Iată însă că nişte economişti serioşi – şi culţi pe deasupra – au preluat sentinţa lui Tolstoi, au combinat-o cu o carte economică de succes şi a rezultat „ipoteza Tolstoi-North“.
Vintilă Mihăilescu în Tolstoi, economia şi Balcanii (Dilema Veche)
Leo Tolstoy famously observed that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy, happily for all of us, was not a teaching political scientist. Had he been, he might have observed that undergraduate political science papers are subject to a different logic. Really good papers are unique – each has its own particular thesis, style of argumentation, body of empirical evidence and set of conclusions. Really bad papers, in contrast, tend toward a dismal uniformity. They draw on the same evidence (garbled versions of what the professor has presented in class), are organized according to similar principles of incoherence, and all wend their eventual ways towards banal conclusions that strenuously avoid making any claims or positive arguments whatsoever.
Henry Farell în Good writing in political science (Crooked Timber)