Quotes about state (9182 quotes, page 67)

“The managers will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production. The state – that is, the institutions which comprise the state – will if we wish to put it that way, be the “property” of the managers’.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 71–72; As cited in: Stijn Maria Verhagen (2005). Zorglogica’s uit balans. p. 300

Way , Exercises

“For the first time in the history of our people, and in the history of the whole American people, we join in this high worship, and march conspicuously in the line of this time-honored custom. First things are always interesting, and this is one of our first things. It is the first time that, in this form and manner, we have sought to do honor to an American great man, however deserving and illustrious. I commend the fact to notice; let it be told in every part of the republic; let men of all parties and opinions hear it; let those who despise us, not less than those who respect us, know that now and here, in the spirit of liberty, loyalty, and gratitude, let it be known everywhere, and by everybody who takes an interest in human progress and in the amelioration of the condition of mankind, that, in the presence and with the approval of the members of the American House of Representatives, reflecting the general sentiment of the country; that in the presence of that august body, the American Senate, representing the highest intelligence and the calmest judgment of the country; in the presence of the Supreme Court and Chief-Justice of the United States, to whose decisions we all patriotically bow; in the presence and under the steady eye of the honored and trusted President of the United States, with the members of his wise and patriotic Cabinet, we, the colored people, newly emancipated and rejoicing in our blood-bought freedom, near the close of the first century in the life of this republic, have now and here unveiled, set apart, and dedicated a monument of enduring granite and bronze, in every line, feature, and figure of which the men of this generation may read, and those of aftercoming generations may read, something of the exalted character and great works of Abraham Lincoln, the first martyr President of the United States.”

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

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Life , Men , People , Justice

“And there will be, and will ever remain, an impassable gulf between the religious consciousness and the logical, unless the logical consciousness reaches up to embrace the religious, and learns to state the absolute Is in terms of the absolute Ought.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.124

Learning

“The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living. Common knowledge, but important nonetheless.”

Reggie Watts (1972) singer, musician and comedian

Cited in: Beats That Defy Boxes: Reggie Watts at TED 2012 https://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way. Posted February 2012.

Knowledge , Memory , Time , Future

“What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits—in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of private initiative—was too high. Most of these criticisms are demonstrably false.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 2 : The World We Have Lost

Loss , Falseness

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. You are totally wrong in saying that in most people’s eyes Hezbollah are terrorists. In most people’s eyes Israel is a terrorist state. It’s the fact that you cannot comprehend that fact that leads to bias that runs through all of your reporting and every question that you’ve asked me in this interview!”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

Interview on Sky News http://news.sky.com/skynews/video/videoplayer/0,,31200-galloway_060806,00.html, August 6, 2006

People , Question , Freedom

“Once you go nuclear at all, you go nuclear for good; and you know it. Here is the parting of the ways, for from this point two opposite conclusions can be drawn. One is that therefore there can never again be serious war of any duration between Western nations, including Russia—in particular, that there can never again be serious war on the Continent of Europe or the waters around it, which an enemy must master in order to threaten Britain. That is the Government's position. The other conclusion, therefore, is that resort is most unlikely to be had to nuclear weapons at all, but that war could nevertheless develop as if they did not exist, except of course that it would be so conducted as to minimise any possibility of misapprehension that the use of nuclear weapons was imminent or had begun. The crucial question is whether there is any stage of a European war at which any nation would choose self-annihiliation in preference to prolonging the struggle. The Secretary of State says, "Yes, the loser or likely loser would almost instantly choose self-annihiliation."”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

I say, "No. The probability, though not the certainty, but surely at least the possibility, is that no such point would come, whatever the course of the conflict."
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1967/mar/06/defence-army-estimates-1967-68-vote-a in the House of Commons (1 March 1967)
1960s

War , Way , Question , Water

“The situation the Lord Mayor holds is the first officer of the first city in the world in point of commerce and riches, and everything that can constitute the magnificence of a city. He is a judicial officer, and a municipal officer too, and from these combined characters there are duties incumbent upon him, which by all the ties that can bind a man to the discharge of duty, he is bound to discharge. It stands at the head of his duties, next after protecting the religion which binds us to God, to govern that civil policy which binds government together, and prevents us from being a state of anarchy and confusion.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Eaton's Case (1793)

God , World , Religion

“Our nation should always derive its character directly from the people and let this be the strength and the image to be presented to the world — the character of the American people.
To our friends and allies I say that what unites us through our common dedication to democracy is much more important than that which occasionally divides us on economics or politics. To the nations that seek to lift themselves from poverty I say that America shares your aspirations and extends its hand to you. To those nation-states that wish to compete with us I say that we neither fear competition nor see it as an obstacle to wider cooperation. To all people I say that after two hundred years America still remains confident and youthful in its commitment to freedom and equality, and we always will be.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Pre-Presidency, First Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech (1976)

People , Youth , World , Fear

“Americans expect Seoul to play good cop to their bad cop. They assume the commonality of language, ethnicity and culture will help the South build trust with the North, so it can put the alliance’s demands over more persuasively. They also reckon the North Koreans will find it easier to yield to soft-spoken fellow Koreans than to the foreigners with whom they have been exchanging threats and insults for decades. But to play such a role the South must overcome an exceptionally high barrier of mistrust. It gets no brownie points for Koreanness alone. On the contrary; from the North’s standpoint it’s precisely that co-ethnicity which makes the puppet state’s long collusion with the Yankees so heinous.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Portrait of the Ally as an Intermediary (March 2018)

Help

“In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill ‘Bolshevism versus Zionism; a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’ in Illustrated Daily Herald, 8 February 1920.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men , People , World , Faith

“I venture to say quite plainly: the oppressed and the exploited have a right to rebel, because they have to reclaim their rights until they enjoy their full share in the common patrimony. The Modern School, however, has to deal with children, whom it prepares by instruction for the state of manhood, and it must not anticipate the cravings and hatreds, the adhesions and rebellions, which may be fitting sentiments in the adult. In other words, it must not seek to gather fruit until it has been produced by cultivation, nor must it attempt to implant a sense of responsibility until it has equipped the conscience with the fundamental conditions of such responsibility. Let it teach the children to be men; when they are men, they may declare themselves rebels against injustice.”

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909) Spanish anarchist

The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1908)

Men , Children , School , Sense

“The Sultan then returned to Delhi, 'which is the capital of prosperity and the place of glory,' and after his arrival, 'not a vestige or name remained of the idol temples which had reared their heads on high; and the light of faith shone out from the darkness of infidelity, like the sun from a curtain of sorrow, or after its emerging from an eclipse, and threw its shade over the provinces of Hind and Sind, the far and near countries of idolatry; and the moon of religion and the State became resplendent from the heaven of prosperity and glory'.”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 238-39

Faith , Religion , Light , Sun

“Globalisation was an unstoppable natural process; free-market economics simply the natural state of things. But when the country that designed globalisation, imposed it and benefited from it most votes against it, you have to consider the possibility that it is going to end, and suddenly. If so, you also have to consider a possibility that – if you are a liberal, humanist democrat – may be even more shocking: that oligarchic nationalism is the default form of failing economies.”

Paul Mason (journalist) (1960) British journalist

The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Don’t assume western democracy will last forever https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/05/soviet-union-collapsed-overnight-western-democracy-liberal-order-ussr-russia, The Guardian (5 December 2016)

Nature , Country

“I have always found it a little strange that the majority of schools are utilizing filters. It seems to me that this is the environment where filters would not be used because the students are so carefully monitored, the activities in which they engage all go toward the same goals of education, and this is the very place where young people should be learning about information and its uses, in other words, where they should be learning information literacy.A recent National Research Center report, commissioned by Congress, clearly stated that information and media literacy are the most important things we can teach our children in order to truly protect them. Instead of placing barriers around the swimming pool, we must teach children to swim. We must teach children to find and use accurate information.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

"Children's Internet Protection Act" http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/02/washtech_policy060302.htm by Brian Krebs, The Washington Post (June 3, 2002 )

Children , People , Education , School

“It should first be stated that a joint-stock company is not a 'brotherhood of shareholders' but is managed by a controlling group of big shareholders while the rest of the shareholders do not differ from holders of bonds with a flexible rate of interest.”

Michał Kalecki (1899–1970) Polish economist

Source: Theory of Economic Dynamics (1965), Chapter 8, Entrepreneurial Capital and Investment, p. 93

“Corruption invariably flows from state to society.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" A New Party Boss In South Africa Is No Reason To Party https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2017/12/28/a-new-party-boss-in-south-africa-is-no-reason-to-party-n2427779," Townhall.com, December 28, 2017
2010s, 2017

“The suggestions of the shrewdest Democratic papers have proved unavailing in controlling the votes of the loyal whites and blacks of the south. Their innuendoes have been evaded. The people emphatically decline to dispose of their rights for a mess of pottage. In this particular the Democracy of the North found themselves foiled and their money needless. But with a spirit more demon-like than that of a Nero or a Caligula, there has been concocted another plan, destructive, ay, diabolical in its character, worthy only of hearts without regard for god or man, fit for such deeds as those deserving the name of men would shudder to perform. Is it asked, what are those deeds? Let those who liberally contributed to the supply of arms and ammunition in the late rebellious States answer the question. Soon after the close of the war there had grown up in the south a very widely-spread willingness to comply with the requirements of the law. But as the clemency and magnanimity of the general government became manifest once again did the monster rebellion lift its hydra head in renewed defiance, cruel and cowardly, fearing the light of day, hiding itself under the shadow of the night as more befitting its bloody and accursed work.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1871, Speech on the the Ku Klux Klan Bill of 1871 (1 April 1871)

Men , Money , God , War

“If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors."”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 232 (1948).
Judicial opinions

“Latro, California: “Terrible diarrhea, Doctor, and I feel so weak!”/”Take these pills and come back in three days if you’re not better.”
Parkington, Texas: “Terrible diarrhea….”/”Take these pills…”
Hainesport, Louisiana: “Terrible…” “Take…”
Baker Bay, Florida…
Washington, DC….
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania…
New York, New York…
Boston, Massachusetts…
Chicago, Illinois: “Doctor, I know it’s Sunday, but the kid’s in such a terrible state—you’ve got to help me!”/”Give him some junior aspirin and bring him to my office tomorrow. Goodbye.”

EVERYWHERE, USA: a sudden upswing in orders for very small coffins, the right size to take a baby dead from acute infantile enteritis.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

April “THE TRIAL RUNS”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Feeling , Help , Baby , Dead

“Modern factory management (but not it must be stressed the management of large modern multi-unit enterprises) had the genesis in the United States in the Springfield Armory.”

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918–2007) American historian

Source: The Visible Hand (1977), p. 75; Cited in: Best (1990, p. 32).

“To walk home alone at night is a disaster, in novels. Some girls confuse the state of being in love and being lonely, and think they are the former when in fact they are the latter; in love with everyone and no one, just because they are without a man.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Love , Home , Girl , Thinking

“Amanpour: Secretary of State Colin Powell has spoken to you, I understand. He has also spoken publicly. He called on you to rein in the violence. What do you make of that statement, and can you and will you rein in that violence?
Arafat: Are you asking me while I am under complete siege? You are a wonderful journalist. You have to respect your profession.… No, you have to be accurately when you are speaking with General Yasser Arafat. Be quiet! … You are covering, with such questions, the terrorist activities of the Israeli occupation and the Israeli crimes. Take care not to make these fatal mistakes. Thank you. Bye, bye!”

Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

Exchange http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0203/29/bn.26.html with CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour (29 March 2002) during Operation Defensive Shield
New millennium

Understanding , Question

“It's not a third way between state capitalism and free markets, it is the free market way. Multi-national corporations should be the principal actors, but they should be properly regulated.”

Ian Bremmer (1969) American political scientist

"The West Should Fear the Growth of State Capitalism," http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7883061/The-West-should-fear-the-growth-of-state-capitalism-Ian-Bremmer.html The Daily Telegraph (July 10, 2010).

Way

“Well, I have been a strong supporter of ending discrimination, and particularly focusing on hate crimes and workplace bias and the like. And in our country, the issue of same-sex marriage, which is a -- is a matter left to each state, each state sets the rules -- is proceeding on a state-by-state basis. I think that is the best way for it to proceed. I have not supported same-sex marriage. I have supported civil partnerships and contractual relationships”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Speech and Townterview with Australian Broadcasting Company http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/150516.htm (7 November 2010)
Secretary of State (2009–2013)

Hate , Marriage , Sex , Way

“I believe that the fight against substance addictions is very important and is a duty of the state and society, but this fight must be carried out in a deliberate way not to produce large amounts of splinters hurting a lot of people around while only chopping small trees.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Vetulai, Jerzy (20 February 2009): Wódka groźniejsza niż egzotyczne ziółka http://www.monar.net.pl/Article8247.html. Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).

People , Way , Tree , Fight

“If the Nakba is a tragedy, then the establishment of the State of Israel is a tragedy. The Palestinians experienced a catastrophe that was brought on by their leaders, but the establishment of the State of Israel is not the reason for it.”

Reuven Rivlin (1939) Israeli politician, 10th President of Israel

Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Rivlin-deputies-reject-Tibi-bill-to-commemorate-Nakba, 4 July 2011

““The two main directions of modern ethics with their affirmation of the importance of individual conscience and the extension of moral concern for all rational beings, as worthy of equal rights, imply a hard struggle to deny absolute value to ecclesiastical or state institutions.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

“Administrative efficiency is not merely a matter of paper clips, time clocks, and standardized economies of motion. These are but minor gadgets. Real efficiency goes much deeper down. It must be built into the structure of a government just as it is built into a piece of machinery. Fortunately the foundations of effective management in public affairs, no less than in private, are well known. They have emerged universally wherever men have worked together for some common purpose, whether through the state, the church, the private association, or the commercial enterprise. They have been written into constitutions, charters, and articles of incorporation, and exist as habits of work in the daily life of all organized peoples. Stated in simple terms these canons of efficiency require the establishment of a responsible and effective chief executive as the center of energy, direction, and administrative management.”

Louis Brownlow (1879–1963) American mayor

Source: Administrative management in the government of the United States. 1937, p. 2

Life , Men , People , Universe

“We use the word "organization" to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing… We use one word for both because, at a certain scale, we haven't been able to get organization without organizations; the former seems to imply the latter.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 29

“Mises believed that feminism was an assertion of equality, a revolt against nature, and therefore akin to socialism; that the family and marital fidelity were essential to civilization; that it was possible to make broad generalizations and perhaps scientific statements about races and ethnic groups; that apparent racial inequalities ought to be studied, although not used to influence state policy; that "Eurocentrism" was the proper outlook; and that one need not be sympathetic to mass culture or the counterculture, as Mises emphatically was not, to support the free market.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: Cultural Thought of Ludwig von Mises, anne, 2014-07-30, Mises Institute, 2016-05-22 https://mises.org/library/cultural-thought-ludwig-von-mises-0,

Family , Support , Nature , Study

“Where mass-mobilizing ‘revolutionary Marxists’ have come to power, and remained in power sufficiently long to create a viable political system, what they have generally succeeded in creating is a reasonable analogue of the Fascist state.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, (1974), p. 134

“I think taking the stage is one of the most unnatural things anyone can do. In a way, just walking on stage actually creates an altered state–it's not right, no one's meant to do that, unless you're a priest or a magician, or something like that. To put somebody who's very incapable in many ways in to that position creates a combustion reaction inside me. I know that, and I take the stage knowing that.”

KatieJane Garside (1968) English singer

On stage presence and performance, Repeat fanzine (2003)

Way , Thinking

“As a mathematician Erdös is what in other fields is called a "natural". If a problem can be stated in terms he can understand, though it may belong to a field with which he is not familiar, he is as likely as, or even more likely than, the experts to find a solution.”

Mark Kac (1914–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Enigmas Of Chance (1985), Chapter 4, On Toast!, p. 93.

Understanding , Nature , Problem

“My views are more akin to the nineteenth-century liberal philosophy espoused by Milton Friedman, especially in his Capitalism and Freedom. In that work, he proposed many policies that are harmonious with free markets and are receiving serious attention in the United States and other countries. This list includes school choice, the flat-rate income tax, rules for monetary stability, privatized social security, and the elimination of affirmative-action programs.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Getting It Right (1997); Introduction

School , Freedom , Country

“The part assigned to this country in the 'Good Fight of Man' is the total overthrow of the spirit of caste. Luther fought it in the form of ecclesiastical despotism; our fathers fought it as political tyranny; we have hitherto encountered it entrenched in a system of personal slavery. But in all these forms it is the same old spirit of the denial of equal rights. Martin Luther, the monk, had exactly the same right to his religious faith that Giovanni de' Medici, the pope, had to his. Galileo had the same right to hold and teach his scientific theories that the Church doctors had to teach theirs. Patrick Henry, a British subject, had the same right to refuse to be taxed without representation that Lord North, another British subject, had. Robert Small, one of the American people, had exactly the same right to vote upon the same qualifications with other citizens that the President has or the Chief Justice of the United States. The Inquisition in Italy, aristocratic privilege in England, chattel slavery or unfair political exclusion in the United States, are only fruits ripened upon the tree of caste. Our swords have cut off some of the fruit, but the tree and its roots remain, and now that our swords are turned into plough-shares and our Dahlgrens and Parrotts into axes and hoes, our business is to take care that the tree and all its roots are thoroughly cut down and dug up, and burned utterly away in the great blaze of equal rights.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

People , Faith , Justice , Business

“If these principles are sound, two conclusions follow. The individual and the local, state, and national political units ought to be permitted to assume their own responsibilities. Any other course in the end will be subversive both of character and liberty. But it is equally clear that they in their turn must meet their obligations. If there is to be a continuation of individual and local self-government and of State sovereignty, the individual and locality must govern themselves and the State must assert its sovereignty. Otherwise these rights and privileges will be confiscated under the all-compelling pressure of public necessity for a better maintenance of order and morality. The whole world has reached a stage in which, if we do not set ourselves right, we may be perfectly sure that an authority will be asserted by others for the purpose of setting us right.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

World

“If you want to get to the heart of this, it's the way we finance our campaigns for the United States Senate and the House of Representatives.”

Richard Durbin (1944) U.S. senior senator from Illinois

Interview by Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, PBS, May 8, 2009. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05082009/transcript1.html

Way , Heart , Housing

“When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Way

““But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked.
“Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”
“But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things — if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!”
Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?”
“Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?”
“It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it. Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.”
“But, but lunatics could brew up biological weapons in their kitchens, destroy cities! Anarchists would acquire the power to overthrow the state, and nobody would be able to tell who they were or where they belonged anymore. The most foul nonsense would be spread, and nobody could stop it—” Vassily paused. “You don’t believe me,” he said plaintively.
“Oh, we believe you alright,” Martin said grimly. “It’s just—look, change isn’t always bad. Sometimes freedom of speech provides a release valve for social tensions that would lead to revolution. And at other times, well—what you’re protesting about boils down to a dislike for anything that disturbs the status quo. You see your government as a security blanket, a warm fluffy cover that’ll protect everybody from anything bad all the time. There’s a lot of that kind of thinking in the New Republic; the idea that people who aren’t kept firmly in their place will automatically behave badly. But where I come from, most people have enough common sense to avoid things that’d harm them; and those that don’t, need to be taught. Censorship just drives problems underground.”
“But, terrorists!”
“Yes,” Rachel interrupted, “terrorists. There are always people who think they’re doing the right thing by inflicting misery on their enemies, kid. And you’re perfectly right about brewing up biological weapons and spreading rumors. But—” She shrugged. “We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” She looked grim. “If you think a lunatic planting a nuclear weapon in a city is bad, you’ve never seen what happens when a planet pushed the idea of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship to the limit. There are places where—” She shuddered.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 14, “The Telephone Repairman” (pp. 296-297)

People , Disease , Way , Communication

“Tell me how a professor spends his Sabbaths, and I will tell you in what state his soul is spiritually considered.”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 524.

Soul

“When I purchase a food item at the supermarket, I can be confident that the label will state how much riboflavin is in it. The United States government requires this, and for a good reason, which is: I have no idea. I don't even know what riboflavin is. I do know I eat a lot of it. For example, I often start the day with a hearty Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tart, which has, according to the label, a riboflavin rating of 10 percent. I assume this means that 10 percent of the Pop-Tart is riboflavin. Maybe it's the red stuff in the middle. Anyway, I'm hoping riboflavin is a good thing; if it turns out that it's a bad thing, like "riboflavin" is the Latin word for "cockroach pus," then I am definitely in trouble.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway (2001)

Food , Hope , Confidence , Idea

“We are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until "justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Address to the first Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) Mass Meeting, at Holt Street Baptist Church (5 December 1955) http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/mia_mass_meeting_at_holt_street_baptist_church/. "Justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream" is a quotation of Amos 5:24 in the Bible.
1950s

Love , God , Lie , Justice

“With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

“Douglas accepted Dred Scott, and in Dred Scott, the Chief Justice had said that the right to own slaves is expressly affirmed in the Constitution. And Lincoln said in the debates that it was implied but not expressly affirmed. The argument against any restriction on slavery was that any right expressly affirmed in the Constitution takes precedent over any law or regulation in any jurisdiction whatever. (Remember, the supremacy clause in Article VI of the Constitution says that this Constitution, and the laws and treaties made in pursuance thereof, are the supreme law of land—anything in any law or a constitution of any state to the contrary not withstanding.)”

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

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Justice , Law

“ One is reminded of the actor, playing the role of a villain in a traveling theatrical troupe, who, at a particularly tense moment in the play, was shot by an excited cowpuncher in the audience. But this kind of confusion does not seem to be confined to unsophisticated theatergoers. […] Paul Muni, after playing the part of Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind, was invited to address the American Bar Association; Ralph Bellamy, after playing the role of Frankin D. Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, was invited by several colleges to speak on Roosevelt. Also, there are those astonishing patriots who rushed to the recruiting offices to help defend the nation when, on October 30, 1938, the United States was "invaded" by an "army from Mars" in a radio dramatization. ”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Pitfalls of Drama, p. 28

Travel , Help , Parting

“[Robert Lowell] is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: “Don’t sit there fooling around; get to work!” — and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don’t do it; and this is so—we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn’t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes — and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Three Books”, p. 236
Poetry and the Age (1953)

God , Fools , Imagination , Learning

“Know the qualities in each one's heart and then serve him. But first, try to know your own heart. Only then can you understand the hearts of others. If you have that understanding, then whatever words you speak and whatever duty you perform will be true duty, God's everlasting duty. If you are in that state, the love you give to each one will be God's complete love. In every situation, perform your duty with this understanding.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

My Love You, My Children: 101 Stories for Children of All Ages (1981)

Love , God , Understanding , Heart

“And finally remember that nothing harms him who is really a citizen, which does not harm the state; nor yet does anything harm the state which does not harm law [order]; and of these things which are called misfortunes not one harms law. What then does not harm law does not harm either state or citizen.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 33
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

Law

“Lenin’ s often-quoted speech to the Komsomol Congress on 2 October 1920 deals with ethical questions on similar lines, "We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’ s class struggle. Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, a communist society … To a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose the falseness of all the fables about morality" (Works, vol. 31, pp. 291-4). It would be hard to interpret these words in any other sense than that everything which serves or injures the party’ s aims is morally good or bad respectively, and nothing else is morally good or bad. After the seizure of power, the maintenance and strengthening of Soviet rule becomes the sole criterion of morality as well as of all cultural values. No criteria can avail against any action that may seem conducive to the maintenance of power, and no values can be recognized on any other basis. All cultural questions thus become technical questions and must be judged by the one unvarying standard; the "good of society" becomes completely alienated from the good of its individual members. It is bourgeois sentimentalism, for instance, to condemn aggression and annexation if it can be shown that they help to maintain Soviet power; it is illogical and hypocritical to condemn torture if it serves the ends of the power which, by definition, is devoted to the "liberation of the working masses". Utilitarian morality and utilitarian judgements of social and cultural phenomena transform the original basis of socialism into its opposite. All phenomena that arouse moral indignation if they occur in bourgeois society are turned to gold, as if by a Midas touch, if they serve the interests of the new power: the armed invasion of a foreign state is liberation, aggression is defence, tortures represent the people’ s noble rage against the exploiters. There is absolutely nothing in the worst excesses of the worst years of Stalinism that cannot be justified on Leninist principles, if only it can be shown that Soviet power was increased thereby.”

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

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age, pp. 515-6

People , Quotes , Question , Sense

“Most matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary. So much for Alexander Hamilton's promise, in Federalist No. 78 (May 28, 1788), that the Judiciary would be the weakest of the three branches of his proposed government.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Conned About Marriage, Constitution and States’ Rights” http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/conned-about-marriage-constitution-and-states-rights, WorldNetDaily.com, January 23, 2014.
2010s, 2014

“While local economies may experience significant price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely in the United States, given its size and diversity.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

October 19, 2004 http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/20041019/default.htm, playing down the threat of a national housing bubble.
2000s

“Circumcision in the United States is routinely performed without anesthesia, though anesthesia reduces the infant's stress and prevents infection and blood clots.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 221.

“…this indeed is one of the most mischievous effects of the proceedings of the Radicals, that by abusing popular privileges they establish precedents for abridging them. My views of the state of the country are more and more gloomy. Everything is tending, and has for some time been tending, to a complete separation between the higher and lower orders of society; a state of things which can only end in the destruction of liberty.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lord Brougham (25 August 1819) in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, quoted in E. A. Smith, Lord Grey. 1764-1845 (Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 217.
1810s

Time , Country

“If there is to be a war between England and the United States, tis impossible for us to pretend sympathy with the former. We shall have allies, not enemies, on the banks of the Columbia, and distant and desolate as are those tracts beyond the Rocky Mountains, even there may arise an opportunity for demanding and regaining our place among the nations.”

John Mitchel (1815–1875) Irish politician

Article in The Nation newspaper on 6 December, 1845, an article entitled "Oregon—Ireland", in reference to the dispute then pending between England and America about Oregon.

War , Mountain , Distant

“The Congo Free State is unique in its kind. It has nothing to hide and no secrets and is not beholden to anyone except its founder.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption, London: Quercus Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1905204965

Secret

“All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men.”

Sam Houston (1793–1863) nineteenth-century American statesman, politician, and soldier, namesake of Houston, Texas

As quoted in the Sam Houston Memorial Museum http://www.shsu.edu/~smm_www/History/quotes.shtml.

Men

“His weariness is that of the gladiator after the combat; his work was the whitewashing of a corner in a state official's office.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

34
Variant translation: His exhaustion is that of the gladiator after the fight, his work was the whitewashing of one corner in a clerk’s office.
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

“Right now, because of the byzantine nature of the way that we regulate in this country, if you have a cheese pizza — you make a cheese pizza — that is governed by the United States Department of Agriculture. No, it’s the other way around. I always get these backwards. If you make a cheese pizza, it’s governed by the Food and Drug Administration. If you put a pepperoni on it, that’s governed by the USDA. If you have a chicken, it’s governed by the USDA. If that chicken lays an egg, it’s governed by the FDA. But if you break the egg and make it into an omelet, that is now covered again by the USDA.
If you have open-face roast beef sandwich, that’s one or the other. But you put the bread on top of it, it’s the other one. A hotdog — the hotdog meat is governed by one. You put it in a bun, it’s governed by another. One of my favorites: If you have a saltwater fish — you have a salmon, and it’s in the ocean, it’s governed by the Department of Commerce. Once it swims up river, it’s governed by the Department of Interior. And to get there, it has to go up a fish ladder governed by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. This is stupid. This is just — this makes no sense.”

Mick Mulvaney (1967) Director of the Office of Management and Budget

21 June 2018 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-cabinet-meeting-9/

Stupidity , Food , Way , Nature

“Americans must know that we're putting the American people first again on trade, on immigration, on foreign policy. The jobs, incomes and security of the American worker will always be my first priority. No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and our enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must start doing the same. We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism. The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down, and will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, April, Foreign Policy Speech (27 April 2016)

People , Falseness , Country , Happiness

“The DMZ does not divide the last bastion of communism from a liberal democracy; it divides a radical nationalist state from a moderate nationalist one.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

"North Korea, Nuclear Armament, and Unification" http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2017/07/03/north-korea-nuclear-armament-and-unification/ (21 July 2017)
2010s

Democracy , Communication

“The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses—not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Part 3, Ch. 1 § 1.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Country

““Organization theory,” a term that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, has multiple meanings. When it first emerged, the term expressed faith in scientific research as a way to gain understanding of human beings and their interactions. Although scientific research had been occurring for several centuries, the idea that scientific research might enhance understanding of human behavior was considerably newer and rather few people appreciated it. Simon (1950, 1952-3, 1952) was a leading proponent for the creation of “organization theory”, which he imagined as including scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human-resources management, and strategy. The term “organization theory” also indicated an aspiration to state generalized, abstract propositions about a category of social systems called “organizations,” which was a very new concept. Before and during the 1800s, people had regarded armies, schools, churches, government agencies, and social clubs as belonging to distinct categories, and they had no name for the union of these categories. During the 1920s, some people began to perceive that diverse kinds of medium-sized social systems might share enough similarities to form a single, unified category. They adopted the term “organization” for this unified category.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

William H. Starbuck and Philippe Baumard (2009). "The seeds, blossoming, and scant yield of organization theory," in: Jacques Rojot et. al (eds.) Comportement organisationnel - Volume 3 De Boeck Supérieur. p. 15

People , School , Faith , Way

“For the mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with increasing strength of the opposing principle.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), P.5

Knowledge , Learning

“AYUSH can definitely help as ayurveda has special medicinal syrups in this regard. Already 5,000-6,000 people have received the medicine at Rajasthan. The National Institute of Ayurveda at Rajasthan has already sent batches of that medicine to different states and we have also requested them to send the same to other states.”

Shripad Yasso Naik (1952) Indian politician

On the role of Ayurveda during the 2015 Indian swine flu outbreak, as quoted in " Swine flu: Government sending ayurvedic medicines to states, says Shripad Naik http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-02-20/news/59339772_1_international-yoga-day-isolation-wards-ayush-ministry", The Economic Times (20 February 2015)

People , Help

“No trace is to be found in the Constitution of an intention to create a dependence of the Government of the Union on those of the States, for the execution of the great powers assigned to it. Its means are adequate to its ends, and on those means alone was it expected to rely for the accomplishment of its ends. To impose on it the necessity of resorting to means which it cannot control, which another Government may furnish or withhold, would render its course precarious, the result of its measures uncertain, and create a dependence on other Governments which might disappoint its most important designs, and is incompatible with the language of the Constitution.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 316, 424
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)
Context: [.. ] it can scarcely be necessary to say that the existence of State banks can have no possible influence on the question. No trace is to be found in the Constitution of an intention to create a dependence of the Government of the Union on those of the States, for the execution of the great powers assigned to it. Its means are adequate to its ends, and on those means alone was it expected to rely for the accomplishment of its ends. To impose on it the necessity of resorting to means which it cannot control, which another Government may furnish or withhold, would render its course precarious, the result of its measures uncertain, and create a dependence on other Governments which might disappoint its most important designs, and is incompatible with the language of the Constitution. But were it otherwise, the choice of means implies a right to choose a national bank in preference to State banks, and Congress alone can make the election. After the most deliberate consideration, it is the unanimous and decided opinion of this Court that the act to incorporate the Bank of the United States is a law made in pursuance of the Constitution, and is a part of the supreme law of the land.

Disappointment , Dependency

“To make the whole Korean peninsula nuclear-free was the behest of the great President Kim Il-sung, and it is the consistent stand of the government of our Republic. The nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula arose as a result of the United States constantly threatening the sovereignty and security of our people. Sovereignty is the lifeline of a country and nation. We have possessed nuclear deterrent to protect our sovereignty from the blatant nuclear threat of the United States and its increasingly hostile policy.”

Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea

Response to questions from Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency (13 October 2011) http://naenara.com.kp/en/news/news_view.php?22+1477

Hostility , People , Country

“Church and State should be united in the White Man's religion.
— Global White Racial Loyalty and Solidarity must be our constant goal.
— Race is everything. In order to survive and prosper, the White Race must overcome its five main enemies: Judaism, Christianity, Communism, Liberalism and Nationalism.”

Ben Klassen (1918–1993) American engineer, author and politician

The Little White Book (1991)
Source: http://littlewhitebooktcm.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/little-white-book-21-sound-bites-brain-bombs-word-grenades Sound Bites, Brain Bombs & Word Grenades

Religion , Communication , Loyalty

“The dilemmas here are best illustrated by looking closely at pre-emptive war. It is a lesser evil because, according to our traditional understanding of war, the only justified resort to war is a response to actual aggression. But those standards are outdated. They were conceived for wars against states and their armies, not for wars against terrorists and suicide bombers. Against this kind of enemy, everyone can see that instead of waiting for terrorists to hit us, it makes sense to get our retaliation in first.”

Michael Ignatieff (1947) professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former Canadian politician

New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004

War , Understanding , Sense , Suicide

“We've come to this moment through patience and resolve and focused action. And that is our strategy moving forward. The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory. Our security is assured by our perseverance and by our sure belief in the success of liberty. And the United States of America will not relent until this war is won. May God bless the people of Iraq, and may God bless America. Thank you.”

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

2000s, 2003, Remarks on the Capture of Saddam Hussein (December 2003)

God , War , People , Success

“For peace and brotherhood at the axis of a democratic republic, I am ready to serve the Turkish State, and I believe that for this end I must remain alive.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

As quoted in Turkish Press Review (1 June 1999) http://www.byegm.gov.tr/YAYINLARIMIZ/CHR/ING99/06/99X06X01.HTM#%200.

Peace

“The reformist project put in place by the U. P. enclosed itself within the bourgeois order…it aimed to forge an alliance with sectors of the bourgeoisie, it didn’t lean on the revolutionary organizations of the working class, in its own organs of popular power, it rejected an alliance with rank and file soldiers and sub officers in the armed forces, it sought to seal an alliance with the bourgeois faction. The reformist illusions allowed the ruling classes to prevail in the superstructure of the state from where it launched its reactionary counter offensive, by, firstly, leaning on industrialist federations, on the petty-bourgeoisie and finally on high-ranking officials of the Chilean Armed Forces…”

Miguel Enríquez (1944–1974) Chilean politician

Answer that Enriquez gave a press conference in October, 1973 when asked: "Accordance to your judgment: Why did the Popular Unity government collapse?"

“Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 107, 1860, p. 524
1860s

Democracy

“Israel is a colonialist-imperialist phenomenon. There is no such thing as an Israeli people. Before 1948, world geography knew of no state such as Israel. Israel is the result of an invasion, of aggression.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Time (9 April 1979) " World: An Interview with Gaddafi http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,920211-1,00.html"
Interviews

People , World

“I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for. As one Frenchman said to me, "What Vietnam needs is another Syngman Rhee, regardless of all the difficulties the presence of such a personality would entail.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower book Mandate for Change

The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963); longer passage http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/ike1.html quoted at Montclair State University
1960s

War , Feeling , Knowledge , Time

“The art of self-transformation for the sake of developing practical capabilities seems to have a similar content in the most varied historical circumstances. The Mamluks and the Normans suffered defeat because they failed to open up and readjust the organizational and social contexts of warfare. The Seljuqs succeeded because they did just that. The West African coastal kingdoms used an extraneous technological advantage to avoid having to change radically. But they could neither go on the offensive against the savanna states nor prepare themselves to resist their European patrons and trading partners.
In all these instances success seems to have required the dissociation and recombination of available models of the organizational and social context of military activity. To have succeeded would not have meant, for the Mamluks, becoming like the Ottomans; it would have meant creating an order that never existed before. To possess the alien, you must change it.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), pp. 169-170

Art , Suffering , Change , Success

“We must uphold traditional social values, which do not permit this kind of vulgar display of beauty. I will just not allow any beauty contest to be held in this state.”

Rajnath Singh (1951) Indian politician

On banning beauty pageants, as quoted in " Home State of Miss World Bars Beauty Pageants http://articles.latimes.com/2000/dec/16/news/mn-1355" Los Angeles Times (16 December 2000)

Beauty

“Let a state be considered as subordinate to the people: But let everything else be subordinate to the state.”

James Wilson (1742–1798) one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and a signer of the United States Declaration of Independe…

Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. (2 Dallas) 419 (1793), at 455.

People

“Subject - (1) a person subject to political rule; (2) a free agent, instigator of its activity - subjects can realize themselves as free agents only by means of redoubling themselves as, only in so far as they project, transpose the pure form of their freedom into the very heart of the substance opposed to them; into the person of the subject-monarch as head of state.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

261
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Freedom , Heart , Personality

“[It] has had the effect of making us the 49th state”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

of America
On Harold Macmillan's government policies, to Lord Salisbury (28 December 1957), quoted in John Charmley, Churchill's Grand Alliance (Harcourt Brace, 1995), p. 354.

“After nearly a quarter of a century of prosperity under the Constitution, the spirit of slavery so far triumphed over the early principles and practices of the government that, in 1812, South Carolina and her followers in Congress succeeded in inserting the word 'white' in the suffrage clause of the act establishing a territorial government for Missouri. One by one the Slave States, and many of the free States, gave way before the crusade of slavery against negro citizenship. In 1817, Connecticut caught the infection, and in her constitution she excluded the negro from the ballot-box. In every other New England State his ancient right of suffrage has remained and still remains undisturbed. Free negroes voted in Maryland till 1833; in North Carolina, till 1835; in ennsylvania, till 1838. It was the boast of Cave Johnson of Tennessee that he owed his election to Congress in 1828 to the free negroes who worked in his mills. They were denied the suffrage in 1834, under the new constitution of Tennessee, by a vote of thirty-three to twenty-three. As new States were formed, their constitutions for the most part excluded the negro from citizenship. Then followed the shameful catalogue of black laws; expatriation and ostracism in every form, which have so deeply disgraced the record of legislation in many of the States.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

Law , Way , Parting , Box

“The state of crisis is the real war; the equilibrium is nothing but its reflex.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 3

War

“I believe you will be shocked by my stating this so bluntly because we are still guided instinctively by those inherited "natural" emotions… in a sense we are all socialist.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "The Reactionary Nature of the Socialist Conception"

Nature , Sense

“The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter II, part I, p. 62

Health , Age , Past , Future

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison… the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.”

Henry David Thoreau book Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience (1849)

Housing

“I was extremely annoyed because I was doing NY1 a favor by rushing to do their interview first in lieu of several other requests. The reporter knew that I was in a hurry and was only there to comment on the State of the Union, but insisted on taking a disrespectful and cheap shot at the end of the interview, because I did not have time to speak off-topic I verbally took the reporter to task and told him off, because I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect, especially when I go out of my way to do that reporter a favor. I doubt that I am the first Member of Congress to tell off a reporter, and I am sure I won’t be the last.”

Michael Grimm (1970) American politician

After an incident with Michael Scotto, in Washington, D.C. (28 January 2014) http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/michael-grimm-michael-scotto-reporter-102785.html.
2010s

Way , Time

“When this war is won by this nation, as it surely will be, it must be one of our aims to work to establish a state of society where the advantage and privileges which hitherto have been enjoyed only by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many and the youth of the nation as a whole.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech to Harrow School (18 December 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 950
The Second World War (1939–1945)

War , Youth

“Again, we should notice the force, effect, and consequences of inventions, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation: and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 129
Novum Organum (1620), Book I

World , Exercises , Star , Literature

“Any prosperity policy is a delusion and a path to ruin. There is no economic lesson which the people of the United States need to take to heart more than that. In the second place the Spanish mistakes arose, in part, from confusing the public treasury with the national wealth.”

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) American academic

"The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, speech at Yale 1899 http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/sumner-boll-11-w-g-sumner-the-conquest-of-the-united-states-by-spain-1898.

People , Heart , Parting , Wealth

“Plausible as the idea of the United States of Europe as a peace arrangement may seem to some at first glance, it has on closer examination not the least thing in common with the method of thought and the standpoint of social democracy... At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. Europe no more forms a special unit within world economy than does Asia or America.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Peace Utopias (1911)

World , Peace , Democracy , Idea

“The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935), p. 51

“Alexander Hamilton Stephens' Constitutional View of the War Between the States, which was and remains probably the best defense of the Confederate cause. It is all about states' rights, and the defense of the minority against the tyranny of the numerical majority, although the "silent minority", the four million slaves, are never counted. It is substantially the book that Calhoun would have written had he been alive to do so. Stephens, who was Vice President of the Confederacy, had also been widely known, north and south, as one of the intellectual luminaries of his time.”

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

1990s, Defending the Cause of Human Freedom (1994)

War , Books , Time

“The craziest of all political systems, the unique leader state, has found its deserved end. History will note for eternity that the German people were not able on their own initiative to shake off the yoke of the National Socialists. The victory of the Americans, English, and Russians was a necessary occurrence to destroy the National Socialists' delusions and plans for world domination.”

Friedrich Kellner (1885–1970) German Justice inspector

May 1, 1945; Vol. 2, p. 930.
Diary (1939 - 1945)

People , World , History , Victory

“The Predatory State is an economic system where entire sectors have been built up to feast upon public systems built originally for public purposes and largely serving the middle class. The corporate republic simply administers the spoils system. On a day-to-day basis, the business of its leadership is to deliver favors to their clients. These range from coal companies to sweatshop operators to military contractors.”

James K. Galbraith (1952) economist

Source: The Predatory State, 2008, p. 146-7

Business

“Government of the United States was made by men of all races and colors, not for white men, but for the refuge and defense of man. If it does not rest upon the natural rights of man, it rests nowhere. If it does not exist by the consent of governed then any exclusion is possible, and it is a shorter step from an exclusive white man's government to an exclusively rich white man's government, than it is from a system for mankind to one for white men. The spirit which excludes some men today because they are of a certain color, may exclude others tomorrow because they are of a certain poverty or a certain church or a certain birthplace. There is no safety, no guarantee, no security in a prejudice.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

If we build strong and long, we must build upon moral principle.
1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Men , Color , Nature , Strong

“The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's issue like you're trying to get me into.”

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

Governor Bush on gay marriage, Larry King Live (February 15, 2000)
2000s, 2000

“Behold the state of man's unstable mind,
Still prone to change with every changing wind!
All our resolves are weak, but weakest prove
Where sprung from sense of disappointed love.”

John Hoole (1727–1803) British translator

Book XXIX, line 1
Translations, Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1773)

Love , Disappointment , Sense , Change

“[Mim, to Nelson, after discussing Annabelle's stepfather being dead] "More and more is dead, are you old enough to notice? Vegas is dead, the way it was. […] Now it's herds. Herds and herds of Joe Nobodies. Bozos. The hoi pollio, running up credit-card debt. Gambling is legal in half the states so they've built these huge moron-catchers along the Strip, all the way to the airport. A Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Venice – it's all here, Nelson, all for the morons. It's depressing as hell."”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Way , Hell , Dead

“No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil Servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Broadcast (4 June 1945) for the 1945 general election, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Never Despair': Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 32
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Life , People , Country

“But this we may positively state, that nobody has made any progress in the school of Christ unless he cheerfully looks forward to the day of his death and to the day of the final resurrection.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 78.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

Death , School , Christ

Quotes about state page 67

Quotes about state
page 67