Phillip Abbott Luce: State

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Phillip Abbott Luce: 40 quotes0 likes

“The state sees violence as an enemy which justifies the increase of state power for fighting purposes. Thus the state can always turn any threat of force into a resource.”

Phillip Abbott Luce

As quoted in “For Utopia, Curb State Controls”, Peggy Baker, Ames Daily Tribune (Ames, Iowa), January 23, 1970

“What Jerry [Rubin] doesn’t seem to be able to get is the fact that if we all go out and Do It! and smash the current state that we will end up with something quite worse. Even if successful, the anarchists are always the first to go once the revolution is consummated. The vacuum is always filled by power.”

Phillip Abbott Luce

Source: The New Left Today: American Trojan Horse (1971), p. 125

“Students today don’t debate whether the state should have any control over their lives, they only debate how much control it should have.”

Phillip Abbott Luce

As quoted in “For Utopia, Curb State Controls”, Peggy Baker, Ames Daily Tribune (Ames, Iowa), January 23, 1970

“The founders of this New Left reasoned that neither the current political status-quo nor the socialist states, as exemplified by the Soviet Union and its slave states, were the solution to the problems they reasoned were facing the American people. But as history teaches, the New Left fell victim to the power politics of the Old Left. As the result, what is still rhetorically referred to as the New Left is, in reality, only a Dorian Grey picture of the original vision of its founders.”

Phillip Abbott Luce

Source: The New Left Today: American Trojan Horse (1971), p. xi

“But where communism is really unique is in its ability to convince reasonably intelligent people that its tyranny is somehow different, and that anyone silly enough to question the suppression of human and political rights in a communist state is some kind of a right-wing lunatic.”

Phillip Abbott Luce

Source: The Intellectual Student’s Guide to Survival (1968), pp. 78-79

“[The state is] never a contract among peaceful men but always a conquest of one group over another.”

Phillip Abbott Luce

As quoted in “For Utopia, Curb State Controls”, Peggy Baker, Ames Daily Tribune (Ames, Iowa), January 23, 1970

“Thus civil disobedience seemed necessary, but the ‘disobedience’ was aimed directly against seemingly unjust and unconstitutional acts. This is the best tradition of radicalism in the United States. But the illegal activities of the Communists are not directed at any tests of the Constitution or of the ‘laws’ themselves. In fact, the Communists are opposed to the guarantees of the Constitution, no matter how many crocodile tears they might shed while using it amendments to try to overthrow the government.”

Phillip Abbott Luce

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 43