Quotes about state
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“No country can possibly move ahead, no free society can possibly be sustained, unless it has an educated citizenry whose qualities of mind and heart permit it to take part in the complicated and increasingly sophisticated decisions that pour not only upon the President and upon the Congress, but upon all the citizens who exercise the ultimate power…Quite obviously, there is a higher purpose, and that is the hope that you will turn to the service of the State the scholarship, the education, the qualities which society has helped develop in you; that you will render on the community level, or on the state level, or on the national level, or render on the community level, or on the state level, or on the national level, or the international level a contribution to the maintenance of freedom and peace and the security of our country and those associated with it in a most critical time.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

"Commencement Address at San Diego State College (226)" (6 June 1963) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx 1963

Education, Peace, Hope, Exercises

“Need I remind you that Stone Mountain and Birth of a Nation are also exercises in political correctness for their time, as are the inscriptions on the monuments erected by several southern states in honor of the service of their state’s Confederate forces at Gettysburg?”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

2010s, Erasing History? Monuments and Memory (January 2016)

Exercises, Mountain, Birth, Time

“If you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home. These are all burning injustices, and – as I did with the misuse of stop and search and deaths in police custody and modern slavery – I am determined to fight against them.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech declaring bid for the Conservative Party leadership http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-mays-tory-leadership-launch-statement-full-text-a7111026.html (30 June 2016)

Death, Health, Education, School

“A criticism with which we have become familiar in this country is that an alarmingly large number of students receiving university education, and the universities are responsible for wastage and unnecessary duplication of teaching arrangements…

… Take the whole of British India with a population of two hundred and sixty-three million. India has only sixteen universities and the number of their students will be about one lac and twenty thousand. The total expenditure on higher education in India is less than four crores rupees.

Let me now turn to other countries. The British Isles afford a good illustration for comparison from the point of view of population which is about is about forty five million; but the number of universities is as many as sixteen – what we have for the whole of India – and fifty-five thousand students receive instructions under their jurisdiction. About six crores and forty lacs of rupees are spent on higher education only in England and Wales. To universities alone within this area the state annually contributes two crores and twenty-seven lacs of rupees.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Calcutta University Convocation on 22nd February 1936.
Source: one crore is equal to ten million
Source: ten lacs is equal to one million

Education, Universe, Country

“But despotic governments do not recognize the precious human component of the state, seeing its citizens only as a faceless, mindless - and helpless - mass to be manipulated at will. It is as though people were incidental to a nation rather than its very life-blood. Patriotism, which should be the vital love and care of a people for their land, is debased into a smokescreen of hysteria to hide the injustices of authoritarian rulers who define the interests of the state in terms of their own limited interests.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

In Quest of Democracy (1991)

Love, Life, People

“[Merton states that anomie represents] An acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the socially structured capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them.”

Robert K. Merton book Social Theory and Social Structure

Source: Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), p. 162 (1957 edition) as cited in: John H. Scanzoni (1970) Opportunity and the family. p. 55

“For, what is slavery? It is the complete and absolute subjection of one person to the control and disposal of another person, by legalized force. We need not argue that no person can be, rightfully, compelled to submit to such control and disposal. All such subjection must originate in force; and, private force not being strong enough to accomplish the purpose, public force, in the form of law, must lend its aid. The Government comes to the help of the individual slaveholder, and punishes resistance to his will, and compels submission. THE GOVERNMENT, therefore, in the case of every individual slave, is THE REAL ENSLAVER, depriving each person enslaved of all liberty and all property, and all that makes life dear, without imputation of crime or any legal process whatsoever. This is precisely what the Government of the United States is forbidden to do by the Constitution. The Government of the United States, therefore, cannot create or continue the relation of master and slave. Nor can that relation be created or continued in any place, district, or territory, over which the jurisdiction of the National Government is exclusive; for slavery cannot subsist a moment after the support of the public force has been withdrawn.”

Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873) Chief Justice of the United States

"The Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention" http://alexpeak.com/twr/libertyparty/saw/, in Anti-slavery Addresses of 1844 and 1845 by Salmon Portland Chase and Charles Dexter Cleveland, ed. C. D. C. (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Martson, 1867), pp. 75–125.

Life, Law, Support, Strong

“In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 256, "What's New: Ritual Revolution"

“Even as a child back in Indiana, whenever I took a Butterbelly off the hook I used to ask myself, "Does this fish think?" I would even ask others, "Do you suppose this Butterbelly can think?" And all I would get in reply was a look. At the age of eighteen, I left the state.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Do Fish Think, Really?
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Age, Thinking, Fish

“Military intervention for reasons of ideology or nation building is not an Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan tradition. It is not a Republican tradition. It is a Bush II-neocon deformity, an aberration that proved disastrous for the United States and the Middle East.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

"At Last, America First!" https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/at-last-america-first/ (April 29, 2016), Chronicles 2010s

“There are two very attractive facts about Ghazwah-tal Hind. The first is that, a Muslim, who participates in it with Iman and sincerity, to support the Truth and to subdue falsehood, will be declared as free from Jahannam by Allah‑swt. If he is killed in it, he will be included in the most chosen of the Shuhada and if he lives, he will receive the certificate of freedom from Jahannam. Secondly; Although it will be a very intense and protracted war, it will end in victory for Islam and the Muslims. Pakistan will no longer remain a small Muslim country but the entire al-Hind will turn into an Islamic state. The Renaissance of Islam will commence here and Truth will prevail over the entire world.”

Ameer Muhammad Akram Awan (1934–2017) Pakistani Sufi leader

War, Truth, World, Support

“I am aware that this last statement may be disputed and individual testimony perhaps adduced to show that in ante-bellum days the ballot was as untrammelled in the south as in any section of the country; but in the face of any such contradiction I reassert the statement. The shot-gun was not resorted to. Masked men did not ride over the country at night intimidating voters; but there was a firm feeling that a class existed in every State with a sort of divine right to control public affairs. If they could not get this control by one means they must by another. The end justified the means. The coercion, if mild, was complete.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Source: 1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 16.

Men, Feeling, Night, Country

“It is known to senators who have served with me here that I have for many years advocated, as an essential attribute of state sovereignty, the right of a state to secede from the Union. Therefore, if I had not believed there was justifiable cause; if I had thought that Mississippi was acting without sufficient provocation, or without an existing necessity, I should still, under my theory of the government, because of my allegiance to the state of which I am a citizen, have been bound by her action. I, however, may be permitted to say that I do think that she has a justifiable cause, and I approve of her act. I conferred with her people before that act was taken, counseled them then that, if the state of things which they apprehended should exist when the convention met, they should take the action which they have now adopted.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

1860s, Speech before the U.S. Senate (1861)

People, Thinking

“Parts of the Muslim Brotherhood have a highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism. Both as an ideology and as a network it has been a rite of passage for some individuals and groups who have gone on to engage in violence and terrorism. It has stated its opposition to al-Qaida (AQ) but it has never credibly denounced the use made by terrorist organisations of the work of Sayyid Qutb, one of the Brotherhood’s most prominent ideologues. Individuals closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK have supported suicide bombing and other attacks in Israel by Hamas, an organisation whose military wing has been proscribed in the UK since 2001 as a terrorist organisation, and which describes itself as the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Muslim Brotherhood Review (20 July 2015)

Support, Suicide, Parting

“In a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege … is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else's labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery. All these forms of slavery together probably amount to half our working hours. If we kept the full value of our labor, we could probably maintain current levels of consumption with a work week of twenty hours. As Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated to produce a dollar he never received.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand (2002)

Sense

“Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. A people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Freedom from Fear (1991)

Men, People, Fear, Freedom

“A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.”

Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer

Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (1983).
1980s

Parting

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

Feeling, Sleep, Passion

“The people of the United States came out of the Korean War sadder and wiser than when they went in. Authorities have stated that two things happened in the Korean War which may yet brand it as the greatest blunder the Communist strategists ever made. First, it awakened the United States to the necessity of vigorously rearming and staying armed so long as the Communist threat exists. Second, it demonstrated to the people of the United States the inherent weaknesses of the United Nations.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

War, People

“Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. This resentment may be incurable. But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U. S. political, economic, and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others. U. S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. [.. ] A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto [in 1970], his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?”

Samantha Power (1970) Irish-American academic, author and diplomat

Article in The New Republic (2003), as quoted in the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578527181938275090.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.

War, World, Decision, Freedom

“The effects of Asian contacts on Europe, though considerably less, cannot be considered insignificant. The growth of capitalism in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in itself a profound and revolutionary change, is intimately connected with the expansion of European trade and business into Asia. The political development of the leading Western European nations during this period was also related to their exploitation of their Asian possessions and the wealth they derived from the trade with and government of their Eastern dependencies. Their material life, as reflected in clothing, food, beverages, etc., also bears permanent marks of their Eastern contacts. We have already dealt briefly with the penetration of cultural, artistic and philosophical influences, though their effects cannot still be estimated. Unlike the Rococo movement of the eighteenth century, the spiritual and cultural reactions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are deeper, and have not yet fully come to the surface. The influence of Chinese literature and of Indian philosophical thought, to mention only two trends which have become important in recent years, cannot be evaluated for many years to come. Yet it is true, as T. S. Eliot has stated, that most modern poets in Europe have in some measure been influenced by the literature of China. Equally the number of translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, which have been appearing every year, meant not for Orientalists and scholars but for the educated public, and the revival of interest in the religious experience of India, are sufficient to prove that a penetration of European thought by Oriental influences is now taking place which future historians may consider to be of some significance.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Life, Education, Food, Literature

“The conclusions are self-evident, so I just state them. Electoral winners and losers obey the results of democratic competition and thus democracy is sustained merely as a consequence of political forces pursuing their interests. Whether this explanation is sufficient or some cultural patterns are necessary for democracy to endure is just hard to tell, as is whether democracy can survive even when it is not supported by economic self-interest.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Chapter 5. "Why Do Political Parties Obey Results of Elections?" in Democracy and the Rule of Law (2003) edited by José María Maravall and Adam Przeworski

Democracy, Support

“Since 1968, the Baath have been trashing the only idea that can hold the great social diversity of Iraq together: the idea of Iraq. Their answer to the question "Who am I?" was: You are either one of us, or you are dead. True to their word, they killed anyone who dared to say he was a Kurd or a Shiite or a leftist, or a democrat and a liberal. Contrary to what many Iraqi Shiites tend to think nowadays, the Baath never wanted to build a Sunni confessional state in Iraq. Anti-Shiite sectarianism was introduced on a large scale after the uprising of 1991. The state that the Baath built in Iraq up until the 1991 Gulf War was worse than sectarian. It thrived on the distrust, suspicion and fear that it went about inculcating in everyone. In this sense it was consistently egalitarian. Atomizing society by breeding hate and a thirst for revenge was the regime's highest ambition and principal tool of social control. Every Iraqi -- Kurd or Arab, Muslim or Christian, Shiite or Sunni -- became both complicit in the Baathist enterprise and its victim at the same time.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (February 7, 2005)

Hate, War, Fear, Idea

““Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.””

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), pp. 396-397

Life, Death, Religion, Fashion

“I have to repeat again and again: He who knows the Talmud, knows the Jew! The laws of the Talmud are contrary to the German system of laws. You should acknowledge the importance of discussing this matter in connection with the judiciary budget. Once you know what the Talmud orders the Jew to do, you will understand today's state of affairs.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Ich muss es immer wieder sagen: Wer den Talmud kennt, kennt den Juden! Die Gesetze des Talmuds sind unserer deutschen Rechtsordnung entgegengesetzt. Erkennen Sie daraus, wie wichtig es ist, dass diese Frage im Zusammenhang mit dem Justizetat besprochen wird. Wenn Sie wissen, was der Talmud dem Juden befiehlt, dann werden Sie auch unseren Zustand von heute begreifen.
05/01/1925, speech in the Bavarian regional parliament; debate about the budget of ministry of justice ("Kampf dem Weltfeind", Stürmer publishing house, Nuremberg, 1938)

Law, Understanding

“If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

letter http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/AldoLeopold/AldoLeopold-idx?type=turn&id=AldoLeopold.ALCorresAK&entity=AldoLeopold.ALCorresAK.p0597&isize=XL to Wallace Grange, 3 January 1948. 1940s

Fight

“What is the real issue at stake? Why this determination on the part of the South to maintain the color line and to fight back with all her strength against the combined efforts of certain groups in our Nation, white and black, to break down segregation and to destroy Southern ideals and customs? The answer is simple. The South stands for blood, for the preservation of the blood of the white race. To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise - openly and frankly stated - upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it.”

Theodore G. Bilbo (1877–1947) American politician

Source: Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization (1946), Chapter Four: Southern Segregation and the Color Line.

Color, Effort, Fight, Parting

“A few years after the Constitution was adopted Alexander Hamilton said to Josiah Quincy that he thought the Union might endure for thirty years. He feared the centrifugal force of the system. The danger, he said, would proceed from the States, not from the national government. But Hamilton seems not to have considered that the vital necessity which had always united the colonies from the first New England league against the Indians, and which, in his own time, forced the people of the country from the sands of a confederacy to the rock of union, would become stronger every year and inevitably develop and confirm a nation. Whatever the intention of the fathers in 1787 might have been, whether a league or confederacy or treaty, the conclusion of the children in 1860 might have been predicted. Plant a homogeneous people along the coast of a virgin continent. Let them gradually overspread it to the farther sea, speaking the same language, virtually of the same religious faith, inter- marrying, and cherishing common heroic traditions. Suppose them sweeping from end to end of their vast domain without passports, the physical perils of their increasing extent constantly modified by science, steam, and the telegraph, making Maine and Oregon neighbors, their trade enormous, their prosperity a miracle, their commonwealth of unsurpassed importance in the world, and you may theorize as you will, but you have supposed an imperial nation, which may indeed be a power of evil as well as of good, but which can no more recede into its original elements and local sources than its own Mississippi, pouring broad and resistless into the Gulf, can turn backward to the petty forest springs and rills whence it flows. 'No, no', murmurs the mighty river, 'when you can take the blue out of the sky, when you can steal heat from fire, when you can strip splendor from the morning, then, and not before, may you reclaim your separate drops in me.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

'Yes, yes, my river,' answers the Union, 'you speak for me. I am no more a child, but a man; no longer a confederacy, but a nation. I am no more Virginia, New York, Carolina, or Massachusetts, but the United States of America'.
1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Children, People, World, Fear

“As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch — not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward — a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Death, Women, Men, World

“Poverty is a state of mind.”

Rahul Gandhi (1970) Indian politician

Rahul Gandhi's 'poverty is a state of mind' remark draws flak, NDTV, NDTV https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/rahul-gandhis-poverty-is-a-state-of-mind-remark-draws-flak-530684 Rahul Gandhi http://www.debate.org/opinions/rahul-gandhi-poverty-is-a-state-of-mind-do-you-agree

“A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts — a "bundle of facts." Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the "law" because they act in that way.”

Joseph McCabe (1867–1955) British writer

The Existence of God (1913).

Law, Way, Nature

“Democracy can't thrive under military rule — history is quite clear on this point … The police state is back, and it is even worse than Hosni Mubarak's. What is happening in Egypt today is very scary: The coup could lead society to lose its faith in democracy, which will give terrorist groups a chance to breathe again…By blocking peaceful change and weakening the Islamist groups that participate in the political process, the coup leaders support this stance and do the terrorists a favor.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Morsy is the Arab World's Mandela (2013)

Peace, Faith, Democracy, History

“We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

"The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," http://www.bartleby.com/229/5004.html letter to the Philadelphia Press (20 July 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), part V: November Boughs

Learning

“He [Tolstoy] seems to have felt somehow that social evolution was standing in his way. He did not like the division of labor. He hated all forms of commerce and trade. The State was an abomination in his eyes. He wanted it abolished and with it, indeed, all of modern society based upon machine industry. With Rousseau, he would go back to the primitive state.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 74

Hate, Way

“So, what exactly are these folks protesting, and how does disrespecting the national anthem and the flag of the United States of America have to do with any of this? Doggone, like the United Negro College Fund commercial used to say, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.””

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Folks, you’re missing the point about the NFL protests (19 October 2017)

“In the course of some ninety years, the wheel has certainly turned full circle. The Protectionist case, which seemed to most of our fathers and grandfathers so outrageous, even so wicked, has been re-stated and carried to victory. Free Trade, which was almost like a sacred dogma, is in its turn rejected and despised… many acute and energetic minds in the ’forties “looked to the end.” They foresaw what seemed beyond the vision of their rivals— that after the period of expansion would come the period of over-production… [Disraeli] perceived only too clearly the danger of sacrificing everything to speed. Had he lived now, he would not have been surprised. The development of the world on competitive rather than on complementary lines; the growth of economic nationalism; the problems involved in the increasing productivity of labour, both industrial and agricultural; the absence of any new and rapidly developing area offering sufficient attractive opportunities for investment; finally, the heavy ensuing burden of unemployment, in every part of the world— all these phenomena, so constantly in our minds as part of the conditions of crisis, would have seemed to the men of Manchester nothing but a hideous nightmare. Disraeli would have understood them. I think he would have expected them.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

‘Preface’ to Derek Walker-Smith, The Protectionist Case in the 1840s (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), pp. vii-viii.
1920s-1950s

Men, World, Problem, Thinking

“Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent 'transitional' societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in so far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974)

World, Democracy, Universe

“In order to win this war, we need to understand that the terrorists and extremists are opportunists. They will grab onto any cause to incite hatred and to justify the killing of innocent men, women and children. If we weren't in Iraq, they would be using our relationship and friendship with Israel as a reason to recruit, or the Crusades, or cartoons as a reason to commit murder. They recruit based upon lies and excuses. And they murder because of their raw desire for power. They hope to impose their dominion over the broader Middle East and establish a radical Islamic empire where millions are ruled according to their hateful ideology. We know this because al-Qaeda has told us. The terrorist Zawahiri, number two man in the al-Qaeda team, al-Qaeda network, he said, we'll proceed with several incremental goals. The first stage is to expel the Americans from Iraq; the second stage is to establish an Islamic authority, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of caliphate; the third stage, extend the jihad wave to secular countries neighboring Iraq; and the fourth stage, the clash with Israel. This is the words of the enemy. The President of the United States and the Congress must listen carefully to what the enemy says in order to be able to protect you. It makes sense for us to take their words seriously if our most important job is the security of the United States. Mister Zawahiri has laid out their plan. That's why they attacked us on September the 11th. That's why they fight us in Iraq today. And that is why they must be defeated.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

As quoted in "FLASHBACK 2006: Media Elites Slam Bush For Predicting Rise Of Islamic Caliphate In Iraq" http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/24/flashback-2006-media-elites-slam-bush-for-predicting-rise-of-islamic-caliphate-in-iraq/ (24 May 2016), The Daily Caller 2000s, 2006, Remarks at Bob Riley for Governor Luncheon (2006)

Women, Men, Hate, Friendship

“Relations between States and within States are correct to the extent that they respect the truth. When, instead, truth is violated, peace is threatened, law is endangered, then, as a logical consequence, forms of injustice are unleashed.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

In Address to the International Diplomats Address to the International Diplomats http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/march/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060318_intern-organizations_en.html (18 March 2006) 2006

Truth, Peace, Law

“Protocols:
Number 11, paras. 1,2
The state Council has been, as it were, the emphatic expression of the ruler; it will be, as the “show” part of the Legislative Corps what may be called the editorial committee of the alws and decrees of the ruler. Br> This, then, is the program of the new constitution. We shall make Law, Right, and Justice (1) in the guide of proposals to the Legislative Corps, (2) by the decrees of the president under the guise of general regulations, of orders of the Senate and of resolutions of the State Council in the guise of ministerial orders, (3) and in case a suitable occasion should arise, in the form of a revolution in the State.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Justice, Law, Parting

“Probably the greatest single weakness of the Sino-Soviet bloc is her shaky economy. Here is a soft spot where peaceful pressures could be devastating. No amount of Soviet propaganda can cover up the obvious collapse of the Chinese communes and the sluggish inefficiency of the Soviet collectivized farms. Every single Soviet satellite is languishing in a depression. Even Pravda has openly criticized the lack of bare essentials and the shoddy quality of Russian-made goods. These factors of austerity and deprivation add to the hatred and misery of the people which constantly feed the flames of potential revolt. Terrorist tactics have been used by the Red leaders to suppress uprisings. In spite of the virtual "state of siege" which exists throughout the Soviet empire, there are many outbreaks of violent protest. All of this explains why the Soviet leaders are constantly pleading for "free trade," "long-term loans," "increased availability of material goods from the West." Economically, Communism is collapsing but the West has not had the good sense to exploit it. Instead, the United States, Great Britain and 37 other Western powers are shipping vast quantities of goods to the Sino-Soviet bloc. Some business leaders have had the temerity to suggest that trade with the Reds helps the cause of peace. They suggest that "you never fight the people you trade with." Apparently they cannot even remember as far back as the late Thirties when this exact type of thinking resulted in the sale of scrap iron and oil to the Japanese just before World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor it became tragically clear that while trade with friends may promote peace, trade with a threatening enemy is an act of self-destruction. Have we forgotten that fatal lesson so soon?”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

War, People, World, Peace

“While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech at the Nazi party Congress at Nuremberg (September 1935) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb58.htm 1930s

War

“There you are', said Efros [Granovsky, director of the State Jewish Chamber Theater, in 1920], leading me into a dark room, 'These walls are all yours, you can do what you like with them'. It was a completely demolished apartment that had been abandoned by bourgeois refugees. 'You see', he continued, 'the benches for the audience will be here; the stage there'. To tell the truth, all I could see there was the remains of a kitchen… And I flung myself at the walls. The canvases were stretched out on the floor. Workmen, actors walked over them. The rooms and corridors were in the process of being repaired; piles of shavings lay among my tubes of paint, my sketches. At every step one dislodged cigarette-ends, crusts of bread.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 38
1920's, My life (1922)

Truth, Painting

“…a false prophet has come among you… who, in a country where all are in the highest class—that of the American citizens—tries to divide us into many, and then set those classes against each other; who tries to set State against State, section against section, and so nullify the great work for which Abraham Lincoln gave his life; who tries to lead us into paths of dishonor and asks us to disgrace the country for which we would give our lives…”

George Howard Earle, Jr. (1856–1928) American lawyer

On 3 October 1896, at a Republican meeting in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, Earle urged his "fellow citizens" to vote for McKinley over Bryan (Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 Oct 1896)

Life, Falseness, Country

“Minnesota is a state of public-spirited and polite people, where you can get a good cappucino and eat Thai food and find any book you want and yet live on a quiet tree-lined street with a backyard and send your kids to public school. When a state this good hits the jackpot, it can only be an inspiration to everybody.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

"Minnesota's Sensible Plan, TIME (11 September 1995)

People, Books, School, Food

“(speking) "You hear about, you see about it/ it's in your papers/ it's in your daily news/ (get money!) / New York chronicles, every day/ the crime rate, the murder rate/ the money rate, the paper chase, youknowwhatImean?/ New York State of mind, baby, check it out.”

Nas (1973) American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur

"N.Y. State of Mind Pt. II"
On Albums, I Am... (1999)

Money, Baby

“[…] ironically, the jihadis are just as opposed to the theory of evolution as creationists. So they have that in common […] This is an area in which Islamists agree 100% with the Discovery Institute and creationists. If that makes you uncomfortable … well, it should. […] I'm making a very narrowly defined point. The proponents of "intelligent design" are on the same page with radical Islamists, on that issue. And the devaluation of science by Islam, in favor of religion, is largely responsible for the appalling state of the Islamic world today. Western civilization has advanced to its current point because we DO have a strict division between these two disciplines. Science is not religion, and religion is not science. If we lose that clarity, we're in danger of losing everything. As I've tried to say at least 20 different ways, this is not a put down of religion. Religion is a civilizing force, as long it's not allowed to rule people's lives. The intelligent design movement is trying to erase these lines and bring us back into the Dark Ages. We should learn from the failure of Islam, but this is an issue that is obviously not going to rest easy.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

June 16, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30370_Video-_Bobby_Jindal_Supports_Teaching_Intelligent_Design/comments/

People, Age, World, Religion

“The President's proclamation is intended to give heart to, and rightly does give heart to, the Right to Life movement. It does so by identifying the right to life of the unborn with the first of the rights mentioned in the Declaration. It does so as the free soil movement and the Republican party, in the antebellum United States, had identified the right to liberty in the Declaration as the principled ground of its opposition to slavery. Then it was understood that the principle of equal rights for all in the Declaration of Independence was, as Lincoln said it was, "the apple of gold in the picture of silver" that gave life and meaning to the Constitution. Then it was understood that the original intent of those who framed and those who ratified the Constitution was to "secure these rights," the rights that defined the moral order which the legal order was to implement.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

Life, Heart

“For the early Church, "church" and "world" were visibly distinct yet affirmed in faith to have one and the same lord. This pair of affirmations is what the so-called Constantinian transformation changes (I here use the name of Constantine merely as a label for this transformation, which began before AD200 and took over 200 years; the use of his name does not mean an evaluation of his person or work). The most pertinent fact about the new state of things after Constantine and Augustine is not that Christians were no longer persecuted and began to be privileged, nor that emperors built churches and presided over ecumenical deliberations about the Trinity; what matters is that the two visible realities, church and world, were fused. There is no longer anything to call "world"; state, economy, art, rhetoric, superstition, and war have all been baptized.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

"The Otherness of the Church" (1961) in A Reader in Ecclesiology (2012), p. 200

War, World, Faith, Art

“Take Jacques Derrida as another example, who when lecturing in occupied Jerusalem in 1986 stated his position as follows: 'I wish to state right away my solidarity with all those, in this land, who advocate an end to violence, condemn the crimes of terrorism and of the military and police repression, and advocate the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories as well as the recognition of the Palestinians' right to choose their own representatives to negotiations, now more indispensable than ever.' Derrida, however, felt it necessary to assert in his speech that the Israeli State's 'existence, it goes without saying, must henceforth be recognised by all'. Despite Derrida's opposition to White supremacist South Africa in the mid-1980s, he believes that Israel, a racist Jewish state, should be recognised by all.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

“The idea of setting up the NDDB was to replicate the Anand pattern in very state, in order to promote to genuinely farmer-owned cooperatives that would procure, process and markethis prime produce.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 83
Quote, Our Leaders

Idea

“Allow me to dispel a myth. People in the Middle East do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our lifestyle. They hate us because we have spent many years attempting to force them to emulate our lifestyle. The US government overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran and replaced him with the Shah. The US government gave weapons, intelligence and money to Saddam Hussein. The US government also helped Libyan Col. Qaddafi come to power, propped up the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian regime, and gave assistance to Osama bin Laden. Most Americans have forgotten these events. But the people of the Middle East will always remember. It was because of American troops in Saudi Arabia, lethal sanctions on Iraq, support for states in serious violation of International Law, and siding with Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians that terrorist leaders were able to recruit those individuals who caused 3,000 Americans to pay the ultimate price on September 11, 2001.”

Michael Badnarik (1954) American software engineer

July 2004[citation needed]

Money, Hate, People, Law

“I am growing fit, I hope, for a better world, of which light of the sun is but a shadow: for I doubt not but God's works here, are what comes nearest to his works there; and that a true relish of the beauties of nature is the most easy preparation and gentlest transition to an enjoyment of those of heaven; as on the contrary a true town life of hurry, confusion, noise, slander, and dissension, is a fort of apprenticeship to hell and its furies… The separation of my soul and body is what I could think of with less pain; for I sm very sure he that made it will take care of it, and in whatever state he pleases it shall be, that state must be right; but I cannot think without tears of beingseparated from my friends, when their condition is so douubtful, that they may want even such assistance as mine”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

In a 1715 letter (LXXVII), as found in Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope: And Several of His Friends. 1737.

Life, God, Pain, World

“[My father] was always very adamant about one thing - if you can't trust the Book of Genesis as literal history, then you can't trust the rest of the Bible. After all, every single doctrine of biblical theology is founded in the history of Genesis 1-11. My father had not developed his thinking in this area as much as we have today at Answers in Genesis, but he clearly understood that if Adam wasn't created from dust, and that if he didn't fall into sin as Genesis states, then the gospel message of the New Testament can't be true either.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World: Leaving a Lasting Legacy (2008)

Books, History, Thinking

“The Assembly passed a budget that makes the right choices for young students across the state by helping schools avoid cutting essential educational programs, laying off teachers and increasing local property taxes. Without a sound investment in our children and their education, New York would face crumbling school buildings, overcrowded classrooms, and few opportunities to excel.”

Jose Peralta (1971–2018) American politician

Children, Education, School, Teachers

“Corporate strategy is the pattern of major objectives, purposes, or goals and essential policies and plans for achieving those goals stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is or is to be. In a changing world it is a way of expressing a persistent concept of the business so as to exclude some possible new activities and suggest entry into others.”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Source: Quote, The Concept of Strategy, 1971, p. 28

World, Way, Business, Change

“Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter XVIII, paragraph 11, lines 16-17

Food

“Consider the attitude our great Vasile Conta held in the Chamber in 1879. Fifty years earlier the Romanian philosopher demonstrated with unshakeable scientific arguments, framed in a system of impeccable logic, the soundness of racial truths that must lie at the foundation of the national state…”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

Truth, Lie

“The President of the United States openly betrayed his country on the world stage. We can argue why he did it – whether it was a mistake in judgment, a failure to lead or simply deference to a man who might very well be his handler. We cannot know why Mr. Trump did what he did in Helsinki, why he aided and abetted our most dangerous foreign adversary. But we watched a high crime play out on national television. We saw a president disqualify himself from office. And if he hasn’t resigned his position by the afternoon or offered an explanation while begging forgiveness, he should be removed for the good of the country.”

Jared Yates Sexton (1981)

About the 2018 Russia–United States summit, That was treason, Donald Trump. We all saw it https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-that-was-treason-donald-trump-we-all-saw-it/ (July 16, 2018), The Globe and Mail.

World, Failure, Forgiveness, Country

“In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Dans tout État policé, la richesse est chose sacrée; dans les démocraties elle est la seule chose sacrée. L'Île des Pingouins http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%27%C3%8Ele_des_Pingouins_-_Livre_VI_:_Les_Temps_modernes#CHAPITRE_II._PYROT [Penguin Island] (1908), Book VI: Les Temps Modernes, Ch. II: Pyrot

Democracy, Wealth

“The Communists were promising retirement for all state employees at age 35. The Socialists were proposing absolutely nothing because they couldn't elect a leader who would propose things. The centre-right parties (of which there were about ten) were all promising employers that they would no longer have to pay workers and would be exempt from prosecution for any industrial pollution that killed fewer than 100,000 people. The far right was proposing, less realistically, to have immigrants barbecued in every place du marché on Friday nights. And in a similar vein, the rural party promised to change the law on endangered species so that hunters could now shoot dodos, unicorns, mermaids and American tourists.”

Stephen Clarke book A Year in the Merde

on political parties in France before an election:
A Year in the Merde (2005)

People, Age, Law, Change

“World peace and security are best served when States observe treaties in good faith.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the right of self determination http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

World, Peace, Faith

“Some Muslim scholars argue that the concept of Democracy is not compatible with the concept of an Islamic state. But of course it is and the Quran outlines the essence of Democracy.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Documentary, A Road To Mecca.

Democracy

“There you have the worst problem for prohibition officials. They resort to all sorts of tricks, concealing metal containers in their clothing, in false bottoms of trunks and traveling bags, and even in baby buggies. On the Canadian, Mexican and Florida borders inspectors are constantly on the lookout for women bootleggers, who try to smuggle liquor into the states. Their detection and arrest is far more difficult than that of the male law-breakers.”

Georgia Hopley (1858–1944) American journalist and temperance advocate

In regards to woman bootleggers. Quoted in "First woman prohibition agent says her sex must see to law enforcement". The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) March 12, 1922 p. 5.
Quoted in Minnick, Fred (2013). Whiskey Women: The Untold Story of how Women Saved Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish Whiskey pg. 33

Women, Law, Travel, Problem

“Richard Feynman presciently stated… that ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’. …within this vast room … there will be a requirement for communication.”

Stephen F Bush

Bush, S.F., Nanoscale Communication Networks, 2010, 308 pages, Artech House; 1 edition (February 28, 2010) ISBN-10: 1608070034, ISBN-13: 978-1608070039.

Communication

“Over the years and against conventional wisdom, utopians sustained a vision of life beyond the market. … Georg Lukács set forth a theory of the “old and new culture” in which he argued that the socialist economy was not the goal; it was simply a precondition for humanity to advance to a new and humane culture. Most radicals do not understand that political power and economic reorganization is not the end-all, stated Lukács. The goal is not a new economic order, but freedom from an obsession with economics.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 27

Life, Wisdom, Understanding, Freedom

“No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified.”

Robert Nozick (1938–2002) American political philosopher

Source: (1974), Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 297

“Wilhelm von Humboldt… stated that the structure of language expresses the inner life of its speakers: "Man lives with the world about him, principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it."”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Word Play (1974)

Life, World

“Putin hasn’t come out of the blue, you know? It’s not just Putin. That’s why again in my book Winter is Coming, I emphasize why Vladimir Putin and enemies of the free world must be stopped. Because Putin, you may call him bosses of bosses, Capo dei Capi, he’s like a spider in the center of this web. Because Putin helps other bad guys, other thugs, dictators, and terrorists to sort of feel free to attack the free world. Because they all know that unless they attack the free world, unless they attack the United States as the leader of the free world, they will have no credibility with their own people because neither Putin nor Iranian mullahs, nor Al Qaeda, Islamic State or other dictators around the globe, they have nothing to offer but confrontation. They have to present themselves of the protectors of their own people against the world evil. And of course, they have to attack the free world that produces everything that, by the way, they use quite effectively against us. They cannot compete in innovations, they cannot compete in ideas, in productivity. But they can compete in something quite different because for us, each human life is unique. *For them, killing a thousand people, hundreds of thousands of people, a million is a demonstration of strengths. So we should realize that they have no allergy for blood. And they will keep pressing their advantage, and it’s not that we have grown – that our enemies have grown stronger. It’s our resolve that has grown weaker.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

Life, People, Books, World

“To remember the ever present Divine at all times, even while acting in the world, is the most positive practice for a seeker who is striving to evolve. He will thereby transform his inner personality from its present condition, to a state of harmony and efficiency.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

World, Time, Personality

“Although I cannot accuse myself of being remarkably unstable, I do not pretend that I have never altered my opinion both in respect to men and things. Indeed, I have been very much modified both in feeling and opinion within the last fourteen years. When I escaped from slavery, and was introduced to the Garrisonians, I adopted very many of their opinions, and defended them just as long as I deemed them true. I was young, had read but little, and naturally took some things on trust. Subsequent experience and reading have led me to examine for myself. This had brought me to other conclusions. When I was a child, I thought and spoke as a child. But the question is not as to what were my opinions fourteen years ago, but what they are now. If I am right now, it really does not matter what I was fourteen years ago. My position now is one of reform, not of revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the Government — not over its ruins. If slaveholders have ruled the American Government for the last fifty years, let the anti-slavery men rule the nation for the next fifty years. If the South has made the Constitution bend to the purposes of slavery, let the North now make that instrument bend to the cause of freedom and justice. If 350,000 slaveholders have, by devoting their energies to that single end, been able to make slavery the vital and animating spirit of the American Confederacy for the last 72 years, now let the freemen of the North, who have the power in their own hands, and who can make the American Government just what they think fit, resolve to blot out for ever the foul and haggard crime, which is the blight and mildew, the curse and the disgrace of the whole United States.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

Men, Justice, Feeling, Question

“…if you increase living standards you make labor more productive. This is why Asia today is becoming more productive than the United States.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

" "Higher Taxes on Top 1% Equals Higher Productivity http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6000", Video Interview (13:28), The Real News Network (TRNN) (January 1, 2011)

“The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 5: Anatomy of Dandyism (p.38)

Pain, Happiness, Pleasure

“Davis was winning a position as a leader in the Senate. Successor to Calhoun, he had become the spokesman for southern nationalism… not independence but domination from within the Union. This movement had been given impetus by the Mexican War. Up til then the future of the country pointed north and west, but now the needle trembled and suddenly swung south. The treaty signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo brought into the Union a new southwestern domain, seemingly ripe for slavery and the southern way of life: not only Texas down to the Rio Grande, the original strip of contention, but also the vast sun-cooked area that was to become Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, part of Colorado, and California with its new-found gold. Here was room for expansion indeed, with more to follow; for the nationalists looked forward to taking what was left of Mexico, all of Central America down to Panama, and Yucatan and Cuba by extension. Yet the North… had no intention of yielding the reigns. The South would have to fight for this… using States Rights for a spear and the Constitution for a shield. Jefferson Davis, who had formed his troops in a V at Buena Vista and continued the fight with a boot full of blood, took a position, now as then, at the apex of the wedge.”

Shelby Foote book The Civil War: A Narrative

The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958)

Life, War, Way, Sun

“Operational analysis … cannot raise the decisive question whether the consent itself was not the work of manipulation—a question for which the actual state of affairs provides ample justification. The analysis cannot raise it because it would transcend its terms toward transitive meaning—toward a concept of democracy which would reveal the democratic election as a rather limited democratic process. Precisely such a non-operational concept is the one rejected by the authors as “unrealistic” because it defines democracy on too articulate a level as the clear-cut control of representation by the electorate—popular control as popular sovereignty.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 116

Democracy, Question, Decision

“In 1872 we sent to the protected countries of Europe and to the United States of America 116,000,000 of exported manufactures. In 1882…it fell to 88,000,000. In 1892…it fell to 75,000,000. In 1902, last year, although the general exports had increased, the exports of manufactures had decreased again to 73½ millions. And the total result of this is that after 30 years you are sending 42½ millions of manufactures less to the protected countries than you did 30 years ago. Then there the neutral countries…they have fallen 3½ millions…you have lost altogether in your export of manufactures 46 millions. How is it that that has not impressed the people before? Because the change has been concealed by our statistics…You have failed to observe that the continuance of your trade is dependent entirely on British possessions. While these foreign countries have declined 46 millions your British possessions have increased 40 millions.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech in Glasgow (6 October 1903), quoted in The Times (7 October 1903), p. 4.
1900s

People, Change, Dependency, Country

“Every monumental work of the State is measured by cubits. Every cubit is measured by the length of the Aspect-Emperor’s arm. And the Aspect-Emperor’s arm, they say, stands beyond measure. But I say the Aspect-Emperor’s arm is measured by the length of a cubit, and that all cubits are measured by the works of the State. Not even the All stands beyond measure, for it is more than what lies within it, and “more” is a kind of measure. Even the God has His cubits.”

R. Scott Bakker book The Warrior Prophet

IMPARRHAS, PSÜKALOGUES
The Warrior Prophet (2005)

God

“From the point of view of the development of Marx’ s theories, his early journalistic writings are important for two main reasons. In his sharp attacks on the censorship law he spoke out unequivocally for the freedom of the Press, against the levelling effect of government restriction (‘ You don’ t expect a rose to smell like a violet; why then should the human spirit, the richest thing we have, exist only in a single form?’), and also expressed views concerning the whole nature of the state and the essence of freedom. Pointing out that the vagueness and ambiguity of the Press law placed arbitrary power in the hands of officials, Marx went on to argue that censorship was contrary not only to the purposes of the Press, but to tbe nature of the state as such.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 120-1

Law, Nature, Freedom

“Unlike every other other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Time Lines, p. 64
Waiting For The Barbarians (1997)

World

“So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Belgrade. In fact, there are at least four communities: the Northern Protestant, the Latin Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslim Ottoman. There is no single language - there are more than twenty. (…) There are no real European political parties (…). And most significantly of all: unlike the United States, Europe still does not have a common story.”

Geert Mak (1946) Dutch journalist and a non-fiction writer

Geert Mak, Europe as a cultural project http://www.eurocult.org/uploads/docs/712.pdf, 2005

People, Communication

“We must begin with understanding that Turkey is vital to U. S. interests. Turkey is really our strongest ally against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as well as a source of stability in the region. It provides badly needed cooperation with U. S. military operations. But the Obama administration is keeping Erdoğan’s government at arm’s length — an unwise policy that threatens our long-standing alliance.”

Michael T. Flynn (1958) 25th United States National Security Advisor

Our ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support (2016)

Understanding

“Hail, hieroglyphic State machine,
Contrived to punish fancy in;
Men that are men in thee can feel no pain,
And all thy insignificance disdain!”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

Hymn to the Pillory (1703).

Men, Pain, Feeling

“In secrecy, bureaucracies grow large, ungainly and unaccountable to those they are meant to serve. When there is no fierce spotlight of public accountability shining, there is no pressure to ensure systems are streamlined or even working. What you find throughout any bureaucracy protected by secrecy is a cesspit of illogic and waste. And because the state keeps rebranding, shifting responsibility from one set of bureaucrats to another, most of the work being done is for the purpose of keeping other bureaucrats in employment rather than satisfying the needs of the public.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 35.
The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy, 1st Edition

“Now, at present Britain has no V. A. T., and the questions whether this new tax should be introduced, how it should be levied, and what should be its scope, would be matters of debate in the country and in Parliament. The essence of parliamentary democracy lies in the power to debate and impose taxation: it is the vital principle of the British House of Commons, from which all other aspects of its sovereignty ultimately derive. With Britain in the community, one important element of taxation would be taken automatically, necessarily and permanently out of the hands of the House of Commons…Those matters which sovereign parliaments debate and decide must be debated and decided not by the British House of Commons but in some other place, and by some other body, and debated and decided once for the whole Community…it is a fact that the British Parliament and its paramount authority occupies a position in relation to the British nation which no other elective assembly in Europe possesses. Take parliament out of the history of England and that history itself becomes meaningless. Whole lifetimes of study cannot exhaust the reasons why this fact has come to be, but fact it is, so that the British nation could not imagine itself except with and through its parliament. Consequently the sovereignty of our parliament is something other for us than what your assemblies are for you. What is equally significant, your assemblies, unlike the British Parliament, are the creation of deliberate political acts, and most of recent political acts. The notion that a new sovereign body can be created is therefore as familiar to you as it is repugnant, not to say unimaginable, to us. This deliberate, and recent, creation of sovereign assemblies on the continent is in turn an aspect of the fact that the continent is familiar, and familiar in the recent past, with the creation of nation states themselves. Four of the six members of the Community came into existence as such no more than a century or a century and a half ago – within the memory of two lifetimes.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Lyons (12 February 1971), from The Common Market: The Case Against (Elliot Right Way Books, 1971), pp. 65-68.
1970s

Democracy, Imagination, History, Communication

“I wonder how many men and women, kids and dogs, go through life in a state of modest misery; how much communal coldness there is, how much extinguished hope.”

William H. Gass book The Tunnel

Source: The Tunnel (1995), p. 226

Life, Women, Men, Dogs

“…under extremely difficult circumstances (Iraq) pursues the inherently complicated task of rebuilding the country. Yet Iraq continues, courageously, to reach for the promise of a democratic, federal and pluralistic state, where generations of oppressed Iraqis will regain their dignity, freedom and the right to join the civilized and progressive nations of the world.”

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017) Iraqi politician

Olivia Ward (September 23, 2006) "Keep U.S., British forces in Iraq, says Talabani", The Toronto Star, p. A12.

World, Courage, Freedom, Country

“We are being protected from hysteria. Isn't that what they call it? Maniacs! The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning — but for half a century now, almost unbearable. And why, for the love of God? What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother?”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 24
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua

Love, God, World

“I am thankful to have borne a part in the emancipating labours of the last sixty years; but entirely uncertain how, had I now to begin my life, I could face the very different problems of the next sixty years. Of one thing I am, and always have been, convinced—it is not by the State that man can be regenerated, and the terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt with. In some, and some very important, respects, I yearn for the impossible revival of the men and the ideas of my first twenty years, which immediately followed the first Reform Act.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to George William Erskine Russell (6 March 1894), quoted in G. W. E. Russell, One Look Back (Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1911), p. 265.
1890s

Life, Men, World, Idea

“But with those who are mentally defective—ah, here is the hardest question of all!—what shall be done with them? …In the case of human beings in whom the light of reason does not burn… shall they be eliminated from the race? Go to the mother of an imbecile child and get your answer. …For these helpless unfortunates, as with those who are merely unfortunate from environment, I should enlist the best and broadest state aid.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Question, Light

“Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. … When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (2007), Chapter 4.
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (2007)

Thinking, Sense, Wealth

“Never before in the history of warfare has there been a more convincing example of the effectiveness of sea power than when, despite this undefeated, well armed, and highly efficient army, Japan surrendered her homeland unconditionally to the enemy without even a token resistance. The devastation wrought by past bombings plus the destruction of the atomic bombs spelled nothing less than the extinction of Japan. The bases from which these attacks were launched- Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa- were to have been the spring boards for the mightiest sea-borne invasion yet conceived by man. The "fighting fleets" of the United States which had made possible every invasion victory for America were ready and waiting. The Japanese had two alternatives; to fight and face destruction, or to surrender. The Imperial Japanese Empire chose to surrender.”

William Frederick Halsey, Jr. (1882–1959) United States admiral

Battle Stations! Your Navy in Action (1946), "The Surrender of Japan", p. 360

History, Spring, Waiting, Past

“Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

Nostalgia

“I am sure that hon. members will realize that I am not drawing on my imagination when I state that last fall there were children going to school in Saskatchewan with only sacking wrapped around their feet. We have gone into homes and found mothers and children lying on piles of bedding in the corner; they did not have the proper bedding equipment or the proper clothing to meet the rigours of a very cold winter.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

Maiden speech, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, February 11, 1936.

Children, School, Home, Imagination

“Necessary preparations have been discussed and taken for the complete and fundamental elimination of this concern, which occupies an important place in the exalted state's list of vital issues.”

Mehmed Talat (1874–1921) Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire and Minister of the Interior

Letter to head of parliament, May 26, 1915. Quoted in "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility" - by Taner Akçam, Paul Bessemer - History - 2006 - Page 8

“This law covers many pages. But the heart of the act is plain. Wherever, by clear and objective standards, States and counties are using regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down. If it is dear that State officials still intend to discriminate, then Federal examiners will be sent in to register all eligible voters. When the prospect of discrimination is gone, the examiners will be immediately withdrawn. And, under this act, if any county anywhere in this Nation does not want Federal intervention it need only open its polling places to all of its people.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Voting Rights Act signing speech (1965)

People, Law, Heart

“[The law of evolution states that] complexity increases in terms of differentiation and structure.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 10 as cited in P.P. Kandelaars (1999) Economic Models of Material-Product Chains for Environmental Policy Analysis. p. 13

Law

“In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

Reading

“This deadly impasse, the tightening of the corporate totalitarian noose, would have continued if Snowden had not jolted the nation awake by disclosing the massive crimes of the prerogative state.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

39:25 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“I look upon an increase in the power of the State with the greatest fear because, although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of the progress. We know of so many cases where men have adopted trusteeship, but none where the State has really lived for the poor.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Modern Review (October, 1935) p. 412. Interview with Nirmal Kumar Bose (9/10 November 1934)
1930s

Men, Fear

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It's being drawn to Iraq. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the eye to come back to the United States.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

Santorum defends Iraq war
Bucks County Courier Times
2006-10-17
Alison
Hawkes
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-10172006-728120.html

Quotes about state page 25

Quotes about state
page 25