Randolph Bourne Quotes (20 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Famous Randolph Bourne Quotes

“Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic. It will not let the elders cry peace, where there is no peace. By its fierce sarcasms it keeps issues alive in the world until they are settled right. It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail.”

Randolph Bourne

Page 438 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA438. Quote republished in " Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), p. 22 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p22.
"Youth" (1912), II

“Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress—one might say, the only lever of progress.”

Randolph Bourne

“The State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade everyone and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-feeling.”

Randolph Bourne

¶23. Published under "Psychology of the State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 14.
"The State" (1918)

“The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit should never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate—a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into experience. To keep one's reactions warm and true, is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation.”

Randolph Bourne

Page 441 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA441. Quote republished in " Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), p. 22 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p22.
"Youth" (1912), III

“How shall I describe Youth, the time of contradictions and anomalies? The fiercest radicalisms, the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible gayety, bitter melancholy,—all these moods are equally part of that showery spring-time of life.”

Randolph Bourne

Page 433 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA435.
"Youth" (1912)

“War is the health of the State.”

Randolph Bourne

¶35. Published under "Psychology of the State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 21.
"The State" (1918)
Context: All of which goes to show that the State represents all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it is a sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the modern free creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. War is the health of the State. Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover. … How unregenerate the ancient State may be…is indicated by the laws against sedition, and by the Government's unreformed attitude on foreign policy.

Randolph Bourne Quotes about war

“We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State.”

Randolph Bourne

¶28. Published under "Psychology of the State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), pp. 17–18.
"The State" (1918)
Context: It cannot be too firmly realized that war…is the chief function of States. … War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. … [W]ith the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. … No one wlil deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces. If the State's chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating and developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well. For the very existence of a State in a system of States means that the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing process of the national life.

“Indeed, it is not too much to say that the normal relation of States is war.”

Randolph Bourne

¶36. Published under "Psychology of the State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 22, where the term relation is rendered relations.
"The State" (1918)

“War is the health of the State, wrote Bourne, and in his full realization of what that meant, he recognized the roots of modern totalitarianism years before the psychoanalysis of fascism.”

Randolph Bourne

Page 5.
Michael Grieg quotes

“Randolph Bourne, horrified at the support of the war by so-called liberals and progressives, had insisted that an unconditionally defeated Germany would become a greater menace to European peace; the war itself, he charged, was the only real enemy of American freedom.”

Randolph Bourne

Leonard P. Liggio, " Why the Futile Crusade? https://mises.org/library/why-futile-crusade" Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965) p. 26.

“War is the health of the State and it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution.”

Randolph Bourne

¶2. Published under "The Development of the American State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 27.
"The State" (1918), II

Randolph Bourne Quotes

“The President is an elected king”

Randolph Bourne

¶19. Published under "The Development of the American State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 36.
"The State" (1918), II
Context: The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected has proved to be of far less significance in the course of political evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king. … Kings have often been selected this way in European history, and the Roman Emperor was regularly chosen by election.

“In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition.”

Randolph Bourne

Page 437 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA437. Quote republished in " Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. 21 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p21– 22 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p22.
"Youth" (1912), II
Context: In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.

Youth

“Every little school boy is trained to recite the weaknesses and inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. It is taken as axiomatic that under them the new nation was falling into anarchy and was only saved by the wisdom and energy of the Convention. … The nation had to be strong to repel invasion, strong to pay to the last loved copper penny the debts of the propertied and the provident ones, strong to keep the unpropertied and improvident from ever using the government to secure their own prosperity at the expense of moneyed capital. … No one suggests that the anxiety of the leaders of the heretofore unquestioned ruling classes desired the revision of the Articles and labored so weightily over a new instrument not because the nation was failing under the Articles, but because it was succeeding only too well. Without intervention from the leaders, reconstruction threatened in time to turn the new nation into an agrarian and proletarian democracy. … All we know is that at a time when the current of political progress was in the direction of agrarian and proletarian democracy, a force hostile to it gripped the nation and imposed upon it a powerful form against which it was never to succeed in doing more than blindly struggle. The liberating virus of the Revolution was definitely expunged, and henceforth if it worked at all it had to work against the State, in opposition to the armed and respectable power of the nation.”

Randolph Bourne

¶13. Published under "The Development of the American State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), pp. 33–34.
"The State" (1918), II

Love , Wisdom , Money , Hostility

“The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations.”

Randolph Bourne

¶44. Published under "Psychology of the State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 25, which omits the Oxford comma in the first sentence.
"The State" (1918)

Life , Men , Imagination , Intelligence

“Intellectual radicalism should not mean repeating stale dogmas of Marxism. It should not mean the study of socialism. It had better mean a restless, controversial criticism of current ideas, and a hammering out of some clear-sighted philosophy that shall be this pillar of fire. The young radical today is not asked to be a martyr, but he is asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader. So far as the official radicals deprecate such an enterprise they make their movement sterile. Yet how often when attempts are made to group radicals on an intellectual basis does not some orthodox elder of the socialist church arise and solemnly denounce such intellectual snobbishness.”

Randolph Bourne

¶4.
"The Price of Radicalism" (1916)

Idea , Study

“The American Revolution began with certain latent hopes that it might turn into a genuine break with the State ideal. The Declaration of Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not only with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but also with the Divine Right of the State. … If revolution is justifiable a State may even be criminal sometimes in resisting its own extinction.”

Randolph Bourne

¶9. Published under "The Development of the American State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), pp. 30–31.
"The State" (1918), II

Hope

“One can but look forward to the day when the matters discussed here by Bourne, Dos Passos, and Grieg are looked back upon as nothing but the curiosities and horrors of a pre-civilized society.”

Randolph Bourne

Chaz Bufe, "Publisher's Notes" (December 1997) in Randolph Bourne's The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 6.