Quotes about state
page 7

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 1.

Communication, Reality

“Waliullah had travelled all the way to Mecca and Medina - a difficult and dangerous undertaking in his days - and studied under half a dozen Sufis and savants of ‘Islamic sciences’, only to ‘discover’ and declare what the meanest mullah in the most obscure village mosque in India had been mouthing for more than a thousand years. He himself wrote as many as 43 books between 1732 and 1762 - thirty thoughtful years - only to re-echo the routine ravings of a thousand theologians who had continued to thunder ever since the advent of Islam in this country! He wrote hundreds of letters to his contemporary Muslim monarchs and mercenaries, including Ahmad Shah Abdali, whom he considered to be the saviours of Islam in India, only to convey the conventional Islamic message which all of them had crammed in their cradles - convert of kill the kãfirs, humiliate the Hindus, and establish an Islamic state in keeping with the ‘holy’ commandments of the Quran!”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

Books, Way, Travel, Study

“How grievously I was disappointed! …I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind and any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person that began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which also have a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I an sitting here in a curved posture… and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off to Megara or Boeotia… if they had been guided only by their idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part… to undergo any punishment that the State inflicts.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Disappointment, Idea, Thinking, Water

“And at some point, I know that one of my daughters will ask, perhaps my youngest, will ask, "Daddy, why is this monument here? What did this man do?" How might I answer them? Unlike the others commemorated in this place, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a president of the United States — at no time in his life did he hold public office. He was not a hero of foreign wars. He never had much money, and while he lived he was reviled at least as much as he was celebrated. By his own accounts, he was a man frequently racked with doubt, a man not without flaws, a man who, like Moses before him, more than once questioned why he had been chosen for so arduous a task — the task of leading a people to freedom, the task of healing the festering wounds of a nation's original sin. And yet lead a nation he did. Through words he gave voice to the voiceless. Through deeds he gave courage to the faint of heart. By dint of vision, and determination, and most of all faith in the redeeming power of love, he endured the humiliation of arrest, the loneliness of a prison cell, the constant threats to his life, until he finally inspired a nation to transform itself, and begin to live up to the meaning of its creed.
Like Moses before him, he would never live to see the Promised Land. But from the mountain top, he pointed the way for us — a land no longer torn asunder with racial hatred and ethnic strife, a land that measured itself by how it treats the least of these, a land in which strength is defined not simply by the capacity to wage war but by the determination to forge peace — a land in which all of God's children might come together in a spirit of brotherhood.
We have not yet arrived at this longed for place. For all the progress we have made, there are times when the land of our dreams recedes from us — when we are lost, wandering spirits, content with our suspicions and our angers, our long-held grudges and petty disputes, our frantic diversions and tribal allegiances. And yet, by erecting this monument, we are reminded that this different, better place beckons us, and that we will find it not across distant hills or within some hidden valley, but rather we will find it somewhere in our hearts.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Groundbreaking Ceremony (13 November 2006)
2006

Love, Life, Money, God

“Not to know vice at all, and keep true state,
Is virtue, and not fate:
Next to that virtue is to know vice well,
And her black spite expel.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

Epode, lines 1-4
The Works of Ben Jonson, First Folio (1616), The Forest

Fate

“Our real problem is not the territory but rather the population of about a million and a half Arabs who live in it and over whom we must rule. Inclusion of these Arabs (in addition to the half a million who are citizens of the state) in the area under our rule will effect the liquidation of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and bring about catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole; it will undermine the social structure that we have created in the state and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab.”

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) israeli intellectual

"The Territories" (1968)

People, Problem

“No species remains constant: that great renovator of matter
Nature, endlessly fashions new forms from old: there’s nothing
in the whole universe that perishes, believe me; rather
it renews and varies its substance. What we describe as birth
is no more than incipient change from a prior state, while dying
is merely to quit it. Though the parts may be transported
hither and thither, the sum of all matter is constant.”
Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque novatrix ex aliis alias reparat natura figuras: nec perit in toto quicquam, mihi credite, mundo, sed variat faciemque novat, nascique vocatur incipere esse aliud, quam quod fuit ante, morique desinere illud idem. cum sint huc forsitan illa, haec translata illuc, summa tamen omnia constant.

Ovid Metamorphoses

Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque novatrix
ex aliis alias reparat natura figuras:
nec perit in toto quicquam, mihi credite, mundo,
sed variat faciemque novat, nascique vocatur
incipere esse aliud, quam quod fuit ante, morique
desinere illud idem. cum sint huc forsitan illa,
haec translata illuc, summa tamen omnia constant.
Book XV, 252–258 (as translated by Peter Green)
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Fashion, Birth, Nature, Universe

“The whites have absolute control of the State government, and we intend at any and all hazards to retain it.”

Benjamin Tillman (1847–1918) American politician

As quoted in Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (1967), by Francis Butler Simkins. Louisiana State University Press. OCLC 1877696, p. 144.

“When this country here was first being founded there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation, so some of them stood up and said “Liberty or death.” Though I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan, the white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot, and George Washington -- wasn’t nothing nonviolent about old Pat or George Washington. “Liberty or death” was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful when the sun would never set on them. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little, scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire “Liberty or death.” And here you have 22 million Afro-American black people today catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I’m here to tell you, in case you don’t know it, that you got a new generation of black people in this country who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No. This is a new generation. If they’re gonna draft these young black men and send them over to Korea or South Vietnam to face 800 million Chinese — if you’re not afraid of those odds, you shouldn’t be afraid of these odds.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)

Death, Men, People, Books

“My father served the State by investing a weaving machine. He told me to make automobiles. It is difficult to create an automobile industry.”

Kiichiro Toyoda (1894–1952) Japanese businessman

Kiichiro Toyoda cited in: Ethiopia: Trade and Economic Review, (1969), p. 144
Comment by Kiichiro Toyoda at the preview of the first Toyota vehicles ever rolled out of the assembly line.

“Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Children, Imagination, Teachers, Joy

“It is not national interests we are upholding — we claim that the interests of socialism, the interests of world socialism, rank higher than national interests, higher than the interests of the state. We are defenders of the socialist fatherland.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Address to the Party Central Committee (14 May 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 365-381.
1910s

World

“What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States. And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state; and withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can be safely prescribed as to details and colatterals. Such exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Last public address (1865)

Change

“Actors didn't use to be celebrities. A hundred years ago, they put the theaters next to the brothels. Actors were poor. Celebrities used to be kings and queens. Then the United States abolished monarchy, and now there's this coming together of show business and celebrity. I don't think it's healthy. I don't want to sound self-important, but all these celebrity shows and magazines—it comes from us, from Hollywood, from our country. We're the ones creating it. And I think it works in close step with a lot of other bad things that are happening in the world. It promotes greed, it promotes being selfish and it promotes this ladder, where you're a better person if you have more money. It's not at all about the work itself. Don't get me wrong. I love movies. But this myth of celebrity has nothing to do with movies.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer

Newsweek, March 31, 2006

Love, Money, World, Business

“There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Anarchism & American Traditions (1908)

“Thanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, 'I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating,' there hasn't been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Libertarians: The Connies Speak Out (Part Two)," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2005/tle339-20051002-02.html 2 October 2005.

War, Guy

“The Jews are not a nation… The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in a lecture at Oxford University, March 2002
Views on Israel and Zionism

“I want to be clear: The United States of America has done what we said we would do.
That’s not to say that our work is complete.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, Address on interventions in Libya (March 2011)

“Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Letter to his wife, reprinted in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne (1952, trans. 1985). (October 23, 1907)
Rilke's Letters

Way

“There will be a sovereign Palestinian state, a sovereign Jewish state of Israel and those two states can, I think, will be able to deal with each other the same way all states do. I mean, you know, the United States and Canada has arguments once in a while, but they’re not the nature of arguments that can’t be solved diplomatically.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Press conference in Ramallah (21 March 2013), as quoted in "Obama Compares Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to Arguments Between U.S. and Canada" in Wall Street Journal (21 March 2013) http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/03/21/transcript-of-obamas-press-conference-with-mahmoud-abbas/, 2013

Way, Nature, Thinking

“There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.”

Plato The Republic

496d
The Republic

“The need, therefore, was for the Communist Parties to be ever-vigilant against opportunism and to weed it out by welding themselves ever more closely with the working class, by enlisting the support of the working class in thoroughly smashing all that remained of the old bourgeois state structure. This could only have been done by getting rid of bourgeois parliamentarism and putting into effect the principles of the Paris Commune; all officials to be fully elected and subject to recall; public service to be discharged at the wage rate of the working class uniting within its hands the legaslative and executive arms of the state; and breaking up the instrument of spiritual oppression, the power of the priests.”

Harpal Brar (1939) British politician

Harpal Brar, Perestroika - The complete collapse of revisionism, pg. 274-75.

Communication, Support

“Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.”

Isaac Newton book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Laws of Motion, I
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)

Change

“I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails — simply in virtue of our mental concepts — that the system is conscious.”

Thomas Nagel (1937) American philosopher

"Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem," Royal Institute of Philosophy annual lecture, given in London on February 18, 1998, published in Philosophy vol. 73 no. 285, July 1998, pp 337-352, Cambridge University Press, p. 337.

“Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.”

Robert Orben (1928) American magician and writer

Manly Daily staff (August 5, 2008) "They Said What?", Manly Daily, p. 8.
Attributed

Problem

“Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Emancipation Proclamation (1863)

People, Faith, Effort, Freedom

“I suspect that many of the world's financial lords are somewhat embarrassed to tell Japan repeatedly at G-7 meetings and elsewhere to adopt a Keynesian solution. Within Europe, central banks and governments think Keynesian theories and policies are absolutely wrong. Despite the remarkable success of pragmatic policies in the United States, true believers in the Invisible Hand reject Keynesian diagnoses and prescriptions. Many observers of Japan have found it intellectually comforting to blame the slump on the plight of the banks, flooded with bad loans dated from the land and equity bubbles and their collapse. They hope that a governmentmanaged and -subsidized rectification of bank balance sheets will trigger overall economic recovery. I think this is a false hope. The bank problem is only a small part of the macroeconomic disaster. It has to be resolved, of course, but resolution that is no substitute for the needed fiscal and monetary stimuli.”

James Tobin (1918–2002) American economist

"Reflections on Japanese Political Economy" (1999)

World, Hope, Problem, Thinking

“To take charge of the most important work under my administration, the building of the Panama Canal, I chose General Goethals. Both of his parents were born in Holland. But he was just plain United States. He wasn't a Dutch-American; if he had been I wouldn't have appointed him. So it was with such men, among those who served under me, as Admiral Osterhaus and General Barry. The father of one was born in Germany, the father of the other in Ireland. But they were both Americans, pure and simple, and first-rate fighting men in addition.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)

Men, Parent, Fight

“Nobody seen form. It's state of mind where you are confident and you think very positively.”

MS Dhoni (1981) Indian cricket player

Half the battle is in your head.What dhoni think about form. https://www.scoopwhoop.com/sports/ms-dhoni/

Confidence, Thinking

“Man is so constituted that health is a purely negative state. Hunger once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

L’homme est ainsi fait, que sa santé est un effet purement négatif; une fois le besoin de manger satisfait, on se figure difficilement les horreurs de la faim; il faut les éprouver, pour les comprendre.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XLII: Headlong speed upward through the horrors of darkness

Hunger, Health, Imagination

“When I was a child of ten, I went on my bare knees by my bedside one night and promised God that I should devote my Life to an effort to free my country. I have kept the promise. I have helped to organise, to train, and to discipline my fellow-countrymen to the sole end that, when the time came, they might fight for Irish freedom. The time, as it seemed to me, did come, and we went into the fight. I am glad that we did. We seem to have lost; but we have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on its tradition to the future. I repudiate the assertion of the Prosecutor that I sought to aid and abet England’s enemy. Germany is no more to me than England is. I asked and accepted German aid in the shape of arms and an expeditionary force; we neither asked for nor accepted German gold, nor had any traffic with Germany but what I state. My object was to win Irish freedom. We struck the first blow ourselves, but I should have been glad of an ally’s aid. I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen who value their freedom, and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we too love freedom and desire it. To us it is more than anything else in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again, and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

Patrick Pearse at his court-martial.Publish by the 75th Anniversary Committee, Dublin, 1991.

Love, Life, God, Children

“The one sure way to have secured the defeat of every good principle worth fighting for would have been to have permitted the fight to be changed into one along sectarian lines and inspired by the spirit of sectarian bitterness, either for the purpose of putting into public life or of keeping out of public life the believers in any given creed. Such conduct represents an assault upon Americanism. The man guilty of it is not a good American. I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be non-sectarian. As a necessary corollary to this, not only the pupils but the members of the teaching force and the school officials of all kinds must be treated exactly on a par, no matter what their creed; and there must be no more discrimination against Jew or Catholic or Protestant than discrimination in favor of Jew, Catholic or Protestant. Whoever makes such discrimination is an enemy of the public schools.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: For thirty-five years I have been more or less actively engaged in public life, in the performance of my political duties, now in a public position, now in a private position. I have fought with all the fervor I possessed for the various causes in which with all my heart I believed; and in every fight I thus made I have had with me and against me Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. There have been times when I have had to make the fight for or against some man of each creed on ground of plain public morality, unconnected with questions of public policy. There were other times when I have made such a fight for or against a given man, not on grounds of public morality, for he may have been morally a good man, but on account of his attitude on questions of public policy, of governmental principle. In both cases, I have always found myself 4 fighting beside, and fighting against, men of every creed. The one sure way to have secured the defeat of every good principle worth fighting for would have been to have permitted the fight to be changed into one along sectarian lines and inspired by the spirit of sectarian bitterness, either for the purpose of putting into public life or of keeping out of public life the believers in any given creed. Such conduct represents an assault upon Americanism. The man guilty of it is not a good American. I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be non-sectarian. As a necessary corollary to this, not only the pupils but the members of the teaching force and the school officials of all kinds must be treated exactly on a par, no matter what their creed; and there must be no more discrimination against Jew or Catholic or Protestant than discrimination in favor of Jew, Catholic or Protestant. Whoever makes such discrimination is an enemy of the public schools.

Life, Money, School, Way

“Now, on other hand, as President, I cannot just impose my will on Congress -- the Congress of the United States -- even though sometimes I wish I could. The legislative branch has its own powers and its own prerogatives, and so they check my power and balance my power. I appoint some of our judges, but I cannot tell them how to rule, because every person in America -- from a child living in poverty to me, the President of the United States -- is equal under the law. And a judge can make a determination as to whether or not I am upholding the law or breaking the law. And I am fully accountable to that law.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2012, Yangon University Speech (November 2012)

Law, Personality

“A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

Way, Idea, Nature, Sense

“The good citizen is the man who, whatever his wealth or his poverty, strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to his family, to his neighbor, to the States; who is incapable of the baseness which manifests itself either in arrogance or in envy, but who while demanding justice for himself is no less scrupulous to do justice to others.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, A Square Deal (1903)

Family, Justice, Envy, Wealth

“…reciprocity is barter. I always understood that barter was the last effort of civilization that it was exactly that state of human exchange that separated civilization from savagery; and if reciprocity is only barter, I fear that would hardly help us out of our difficulty. My noble friend read some extracts from the speeches of those who had the misfortune to be in Parliament at that time, and he honoured me by reading an extract from the speech I then made in the other House of Parliament. That was a speech in favour of reciprocity, and indicated the means by which reciprocity could be obtained. That is to say…by the negotiation of a treaty of commerce, by reciprocal exchange and the lowering of duties, the products of the two negotiating countries would find a freer access and consumption in the two countries than they formerly possessed. But when he taunts me with his quotation of some musty phrases of mine 40 years ago, I must remind him that we had elements then on which treaties of reciprocity could be negotiated. At that time, although the great changes of Sir Robert Peel had taken place, there were 168 articles in the tariff which were materials by which you could have negotiated, if that was a wise and desirable policy, commercial treaties of reciprocity. What is the number you now have in the tariff? Twenty-two. Those who talk of negotiating treaties of reciprocity…have they the materials for negotiating treaties of reciprocity? You have lost the opportunity. I do not want to enter into the argument at the present moment; but England cannot pursue that policy.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech in the House of Lords (29 April 1879), reported in The Times (30 April 1879), p. 8.
1870s

Fear, Effort, Change, Time

“I have been a consistent and strong opponent of this war. I have also tried to act responsibly in that opposition to ensure that, having made the decision to go into Iraq, we provide our troops, who perform valiantly, the support they need to complete their mission. I have also stated publicly that I think we have both strategic interests and humanitarian responsibilities in ensuring that Iraq is as stable as possible under the circumstances. Finally, I said publicly that it is my preference not to micromanage the Commander-in-Chief in the prosecution of war. Ultimately, I do not believe that is the ideal role for Congress to play. But at a certain point, we have to draw a line. At a certain point, the American people have to have some confidence that we are not simply going down this blind alley in perpetuity.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances, for waiting and patience is over. Too many lives have been lost and too many billions have been spent for us to trust the President on another tried-and-failed policy, opposed by generals and experts, opposed by Democrats and Republicans, opposed by Americans and even the Iraqis themselves. It is time to change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back, and it is time to refocus America's effort on the wider struggle against terror yet to be won.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Floor Statement on President's Decision to Increase Troops in Iraq (19 January 2007)
2007

War, People, Confidence, Support

“The willfully idle man, like the willfully barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy, and vigorous community. Moreover, the gross and hideous selfishness for which each stands defeats even its own miserable aims. Exactly as infinitely the happiest woman is she who has borne and brought up many healthy children, so infinitely the happiest man is he who has toiled hard and successfully in his life-work. The work may be done in a thousand different ways —with the brain or the hands, in the study, the field, or the workshop—if it is honest work, honestly done and well worth doing, that is all we have a right to ask. Every father and mother here, if they are wise, will bring up their children not to shirk difficulties, but to meet them and overcome them; not to strive after a life of ignoble ease, but to strive to do their duty, first to themselves and their families, and then to the whole state; and this duty must inevitably take the shape of work in some form or other.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties

Life, Children, Family, Way

“The monopolization of money and banking is the ultimate pillar on which the modern state rests. In fact, it is probably become the most cherished instrument for increasing state income. For nowhere else can the state make the connection between redistribution-expenditure and exploitation-return more directly, quickly, and securely than by monopolizing money and banking. And nowhere else are the state's schemes less clearly understood than here.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

"Banking, Nation States, and International Politics" http://www.mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae4_1_3.pdf, Mises Institute, (20 July 2005)

Money

“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting (footnote #22), Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 192 L. Ed. 2d 609 (2015) ; decided June 26, 2015.
2010s

Law, Personality

“As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil. A government that, instead of fulfilling its task, sought to go so far as actually to infringe on personal security of life and health, freedom, and property would, of course, be altogether bad.”

Ludwig von Mises book Liberalism

Source: Liberalism (1927), Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 11. The Limits of Governmental Activity

Life, Health, Freedom, Evil

“I am sure there never was a people, who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs, than those of the United States; and I should be pained to believe, that they have forgotten that agency, which was so often manifested during our revolution, or that they failed to consider the omnipotence of that God, who is alone able to protect them.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to John Armstrong, 11 March 1782, in Ford's Writings of George Washington (1891), vol. XII, p. 111. This is frequently attached to part of a letter to Brigadier-General Nelson of 20 August 1778, as in this 1864 example from B. F. Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, pp. 33-34:
I am sure that there never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs than those of the United States; and I should be pained to believe that they have forgotten that agency which was so often manifested during the Revolution, or that they failed to consider the omnipotence of that God who is alone able to protect them. He must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.
1780s

God, Pain, People

“I feel that you have not only reflected honor upon the state which for its good fortune has you as its chief executive, but upon the whole nation. It is incumbent upon every man throughout this country not only to hold up your hands in the course you have been following, but to show his realization that the matter is one of vital concern to us all.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

Feeling, Country

“The creation of a socially just state, a model society that would continue to eradicate all social barriers.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech to workers at Berlin’s Rheinmetall-Borsig factory, Oct. 10, 1940. As quoted in, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Götz Aly, New York: NY, Metropolitan Books (2007) p. 13. https://books.google.com/books?id=hOIpGubiiZYC&pg=PA13 1940s

“From of old, amid the rage of robbery and blood-lust, it came to wise men's consciousness that the human race was suffering from a malady which necessarily kept it in progressive deterioration. Many a hint from observation of the natural man, as also dim half-legendary memories, had made them guess the primal nature of this man, and that his present state is therefore a degeneration. A mystery enwrapped Pythagoras, the preacher of vegetarianism; no philosopher since him has pondered on the essence of the world, without recurring to his teaching. Silent fellowships were founded, remote from turmoil of the world, to carry out this doctrine as a sanctification from sin and misery. Among the poorest and most distant from the world appeared the Saviour, no more to teach redemption's path by precept, but example; his own flesh and blood he gave as last and highest expiation for all the sin of outpoured blood and slaughtered flesh, and offered his disciples wine and bread for each day's meal:—"Taste such alone, in memory of me." … Perhaps the one impossibility, of getting all professors to continually observe this ordinance of the Redeemer's, and abstain entirely from animal food, may be taken for the essential cause of the early decay of the Christian religion as Christian Church. But to admit that impossibility, is as much as to confess the uncontrollable downfall of the human race itself.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Part II
Religion and Art (1880)

Men, World, Religion, Food

“I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged. Now, I should tell you, I should be honest, as President of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn't flow so freely because then I wouldn't have to listen to people criticizing me all the time. I think people naturally are — when they're in positions of power sometimes thinks, oh, how could that person say that about me, or that's irresponsible, or — but the truth is that because in the United States information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear. It forces me to examine what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis to see, am I really doing the very best that I could be doing for the people of the United States. And I think the Internet has become an even more powerful tool for that kind of citizen participation.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Interview in Shanghai, as quoted in China Daily (17 November 2009)
2009, Town Hall meeting in Shanghai (November 2009)

People, Truth, Democracy, Nature

“Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship.** Terrorism and Communism : A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920; 1975), p. 153* The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state … Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i. e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), p. 177

Life, Communication

“The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Introduction
Naked Lunch (1959)

People, Lie, Dogs, Way

“The idea of the saint is the exact opposite of the priest in service of the Holy. The priest is a functionary of the Holy;' there is no Holy without its officials, without the bureaucratic machinery supporting it, organizing its ritual, from the Aztecs' official of human sacrifice to the modern sacred state or army rituals. The saint on the contrary, occupies the object petit a, of pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution. He… enacts no ritual, he conjures nothing, he just persists in his inert presence.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

130
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Idea, Support

“I think [that] '[t]he judicial Power of the United States' conferred upon this Court 'and such inferior courts as Congress may establish', must be deemed to be the judicial power as understood by our common-law tradition. That is the power 'to say what the law is', Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803), not the power to change it.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

James M. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia, 501 U.S. 529 http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/89-680.ZC3.html (1991) (concurring). 1990s

Law, Thinking, Change

“M. André Mayer … made an astonishing confidence not long ago. “The laboratories,” he said, “are working at this moment with splendid results. In physics and biology, for example, we can predict new and very important discoveries. What is humanity going to do with the power which will soon be put into its hands? Humanity is not yet ready to receive this power. It is not in a state to make good use of it.” The events of the moment prove that this power, of which we know very little yet, and which is announced to us with such proper reserve, has little chance of serving the cause of man straight away. It will more probably be employed, or rather confiscated, for the benefit of the ambitious, the impudent, and the reckless.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. xii

Confidence, Chance

“The child tells what he got for Christmas, the mature man tells how he spent the day; the immature hunter tells how many birds he shot, the mature gunner tells of the experience. If I can impart a sense of gunning values through my writing, I urge the gunner at any age to lift himself above the childish state of mind, thinking only of himself and not what he is doing to the birds.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Age, Bird, Thinking, Sense

“In those years, when I came to the States, people were always asking me why I didn’t sing anymore. I’d tell them, ‘I sing all around the world—Asia, Africa, Europe—but if you don’t sing in the US, then you haven’t really made it.’ That’s why I’ll always be grateful to Paul Simon. He allowed me to bring my music back to my friends in this country.”

Miriam Makeba (1932–2008) South African singer and civil rights activist

As quoted in Poet, J. (11 February 2009)

People, World, Music, Singing

“My own opinion—which I may as well indicate at the outset—is that pure Anarchism, though it should be the ultimate ideal, to which society should continually approximate, is for the present impossible, and would not survive more than a year or two at most if it were adopted. On the other hand, both Marxian Socialism and Syndicalism, in spite of many drawbacks, seem to me calculated to give rise to a happier and better world than that in which we live. I do not, however, regard either of them as the best practicable system. Marxian Socialism, I fear, would give far too much power to the State, while Syndicalism, which aims at abolishing the State, would, I believe, find itself forced to reconstruct a central authority in order to put an end to the rivalries of different groups of producers. The best practicable system, to my mind, is that of Guild Socialism, which concedes what is valid both in the claims of the State Socialists and in the Syndicalist fear of the State, by adopting a system of federalism among trades for reasons similar to those which are recommending federalism among nations.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Introduction, p. 6
1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918)

World, Fear

“In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace —
Radiant palace — reared its head.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

" The Haunted Palace http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/poe/17478" (1839), st. 1.

Angels

“The principal source of the harm done by the State is the fact that power is its chief end.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Principles of Social Reconstruction (1917), Ch. II: The State
1910s

“I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

New York Herald Tribune (11 September 1932)

God

“If those democrats really think slavery wrong they will be much pleased when earnest men in the slave states take up a plan of gradual emancipation and go to work energetically and very kindly to get rid of the evil. Now let us test them. Frank Blair tried it; and he ran for Congress in '58, and got beaten. Did the democracy feel bad about it? I reckon not, I guess you all flung up your hats and shouted 'Hurrah for the Democracy!”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Men, Feeling, Democracy, Thinking

“The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

The Beginning of Time (1996)

“What makes me cautiously optimistic about my successor and the shift from campaign mode to governance is there’s something about the solemn responsibilities of that office, the extraordinary demands that are placed on the United States -- not just by its own people but by people around the world -- that forces you to focus, that demands seriousness. And if you’re not serious about the job, then you probably won’t be there very long because it will expose problems. Even when you’re doing a job, even when you are attentive, there are so many things that come across your desk that people are going to question you, and you’re going to have opponents and you’re going to have critics, and you figure that out pretty fast when you’re sitting there. And I think the President-elect is going to see fairly quickly that the demands and responsibilities of a U. S. President are not ones that you can treat casually, and that in a big, complex, diverse country, the only way that you can be successful is by listening and reaching out and working with a wide variety of people.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, News Conference With Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany (November 2016)

People, World, Way, Question

“It's not the state that's the place of salvation, it's the individual psyche. There's an ethic that goes along with that: it's within the individual that redemption is manifested.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

“Like its progenitor, capitalism, fascism is totally opposed to socialism. Fascist Germany and Italy attacked both the other capitalist states and the Soviet Union, which was still the only socialist state in the world by 1939. The defeat of fascism was therefore a victory for socialism, and at the same time it preserved the other capitalist nations from having to take the historically retrograde step of fascism.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 310.

World, Time, Victory

“Capitalists and their predecessors—slaveowners, moneylenders, merchant-investors—owe their very existence to the State. In early times, concentration of political and spiritual power precedes economic stratification in society.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation (2017), p. 7

Time

“The lion laying with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are of course that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnal house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end. This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way so that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Life, Way, Idea, Reality

“Facts, facts, facts,' cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true. But the scientist will surely not recognize something which depends on men's varying states of mind to be the firm foundation of science.”

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher

Gottlob Frege (1956). "The thought: A logical inquiry" in: Peter Ludlow (1997) Readings in the Philosophy of Language. p. 27

Men, Science, Dependency

“Let us be aware that while they [the Soviet leadership] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals (8 March 1983)
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)

People, World, Evil

“Among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other and to learn to love each other. It seems to me that lesson at that morning is something that we must carry with us every day.”

Deval Patrick (1956) 71st Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA

Sep. 11 Memorial service speech, Boston (September 11, 2007) http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/09/13/patrick_defends_sept_11_speech/

Love, Failure, Understanding, Learning

“I wonder, if France really wants to create a Muslim state in Europe, why don't they empower them to do this in Paris or Britain?”

Ratko Mladić (1943) Commander of the Bosnian Serb military

Interview with Gaspari di Sklafani in DJente, Han Pijesak, 1994
Interviews (1993 – 1995)

“The several points of the Dred Scott decision, in connection with Senator Douglas's "care-not" policy, constitute the piece of machinery, in its present state of advancement. This was the third point gained. The working points of that machinery are: (1) That no negro slave, imported as such from Africa, and no descendant of such slave, can ever be a citizen of any State, in the sense of that term as used in the Constitution of the United States. This point is made in order to deprive the negro in every possible event of the benefit of that provision of the United States Constitution which declares that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." (2) That, "subject to the Constitution of the United States," neither Congress nor a territorial legislature can exclude slavery from any United States Territory. This point is made in order that individual men may fill up the Territories with slaves, without danger of losing them as property, and thus enhance the chances of permanency to the institution through all the future. (3) That whether the holding a negro in actual slavery in a free State makes him free as against the holder, the United States courts will not decide, but will leave to be decided by the courts of any slave State the negro may be forced into by the master. This point is made not to be pressed immediately, but, if acquiesced in for a while, and apparently indorsed by the people at an election, then to sustain the logical conclusion that what Dred Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred Scott in the free State of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one or one thousand slaves in Illinois or in any other free State.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

Men, People, Decision, Sense

“Truly there is no cause for you to be miserable and unhappy. You yourself impose limitations on your true nature of infinite Being and then weep that you are but a finite creature. Then you take up this or that sadhana to transcend the nonexistent limitations. But if your sadhana itself assumes the existence of the limitations, how can it help you to transcend them? Hence I say know that you are really the infinite, pure Being, the Self Absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. Therefore, you can never be really ignorant of the Self; your ignorance is merely a formal ignorance… Know then that true Knowledge does not create a new Being for you; it only removes your "ignorant ignorance." Bliss is not added to your nature; it is merely revealed as your true and natural state, eternal and imperishable. The only way to be rid of your grief is to know and be the Self.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

Abide as the Self

Way, Nature, Knowledge, Help

“The state will only ever be a half of itself.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Socrates in Plato's Republic talking about women lacking rights. As quoted by Bettany Hughes: "Feminism started with the Buddha and Confucius 25 centuries ago" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11785181/Feminism-started-with-the-Buddha-and-Confucius-25-centuries-ago.html. Attributed

“For a while I gave myself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of picturing machines and devising new forms. It was a mental state of happiness about as complete as I have ever known in life. … When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven−league boots. In less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name, and which are used under many other names all over the world. It was, perhaps, providential that the necessities of existence commanded a temporary halt to this consuming activity of the mind.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

The last line is about having to take up a job
My Inventions (1919)

Life, Happiness, World, Nature

“We've done our part. And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends: We did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger. We made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all. And so, good-bye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989), Farewell Address (1989)

Women, Men, God, Time

“I think so-called unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded. We need great freedom, no discrimination, no demagoguery and a lot of love. We need rules of conduct and also, if necessary, direct intervention from the state to correct the more intolerable inequalities.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2010s, 2013, Interview in La Repubblica

Love, Thinking, Freedom, Strong

“Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America … We argued that is was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves — and yet it prescribed no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.
We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely strong.
We thought it was more likely, though, that their framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves of composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday.
Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives — which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again, perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind.
Eliza and I … proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble, or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slapstick

Source: Slapstick (1976), Ch. 6

Happiness, People, World, Family

“When man is raised from his slumber in the senses, he feels that he is a man, he surveys his surroundings, and finds that he is in a state. He was introduced into this state, by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. But as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political condition forced upon him by necessity, and only calculated for that condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the passion of love.”

Friedrich Schiller book On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Letter 3
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Love, Law, Beauty, Feeling

“When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans — an avian flu pandemic.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

New York Times Op-Ed "Grounding a Pandemic" (6 June 2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/opinion/06obama.html?ex=1275710400&en=69f51e47097d5dd9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss by Barack Obama and Richard Lugar 2005

Nature, Thinking

“[I've changed a bit here - see youtube video "Jordan Peterson - Are YOU Antisocial?!"] We have these shared frames of reference, like when we're playing monopoly. Children at three learn to play games, which means that they learn to organize their own internal motivational states into a hierarchy that includes the emotional states of other people. And that means they can play. And that's what everyone does when they're out in the world. That's why we can go about our daily business - we all know the rules. That's why we can sit in the same room without fighting each other. Because you're smart and socially conscious, you can walk into a room full of people and know what to do. If you're civilized and social you can just do it, and you can predict what all the other primates are up to, and they won't kill you. That's what it means to be part of the same tribe. People are very peculiar creatures and God only knows what they're up to. As long as they're playing the same game that you are, you don't have to know what they're up to, and you can predict what they're going to do because you understand their motivational states. And so, part of the building and constructing of higher order moral goals is the establishment of joint frames of reference that allow multiple people to pursue the goals that they're interested in simultaneously. Not all shared frames of reference can manage that. There's a small subset of them that are optimized so that not only can multiple people play them, but multiple people can play them, AND enjoy them, AND do it repeatedly across a long period of time. So it's iterability that partly defines the utility of a higher order moral structure, and that is not arbitrary. It's an emergent property of biological interactions. It's not arbitrary at all, because a lot of what's constraining your games is your motivational substructure and those ancient circuits that are status oriented, which operate within virtually every animal. Virtually every animal has a status counter. Creatures organize themselves into dominance hierarchies. The reason they do that is because that works. It's a solution to the Darwinian problem of existence. It's not just an epiphenomena. It's the real thing. So your environment is fundamentally dominance hierarchy, plus God only knows where you are. And that's order and chaos. And part of the reason people fight to preserve their dominance hierarchies is because it's better to be a slave who knows what the hell is going on than someone who is thrown screaming and naked into the jungle at night. And that's the difference between order and chaos. And we like order better than chaos and it's no wonder. And invite a little chaos in for entertainment now and then, but it has to be done voluntarily, and generally you don't want the kind of chaos that upsets your entire conceptual structure. You're willing to fool around on the fringes a little bit, but you know, when the going gets serious you're pretty much likely to bail out.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

God, Children, People, World

“We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world – including in my own country. The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country – I know, because I am one of them.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama to the Turkish Parliament http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-President-Obama-To-The-Turkish-Parliament (April 6, 2009) 2009

World, Family, Faith, Country

“America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try. I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America. And together with your help and God's grace we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2012, Re-election Speech (November 2012)

Love, God, World, Idea

“I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience. Then you arrive in the States and it is $150 to go to an opera. Ridiculous. We have so much young talent on the streets, but because everything is commercial they finally drift away from their dream of their life.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948) Soviet-American dancer, choreographer, and actor born in Letonia, Soviet Union

The Daily Telegraph, 09/02/2004.

Life, People, Dreams, Art

“According to American principle and practice the public is the ruler of the State, and in order to rule rightly it should be informed correctly.”

William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) American newspaper publisher

N.Y. Journal-American (November 11, 1954)

“The authority of the State was not a product, but a presupposition. It could not depend on the people, in fact, the people depended on the State… The Fascist state, on the other hand, is a popular state, and, in that sense, a democratic State par excellence… Every citizen shares a relationship with the State and is so intimate that the State exists only in so far as it is made to exist by the citizen.”

Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher and politician

Orgini e dottrina del fascismo, Rome: Libreria del Littorio, (1929). Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, A. James Gregor, translator and editor, Transaction Publishers (2003) p. 28

People, Sense, Dependency

“During war all institutions and organs of the State and of public opinion become, directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is particularly true of the Press. No government carrying on a serious war will allow publications to exist on its territory which, openly or indirectly support the enemy.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 3

War, Support

“Throughout its history, Israel has been anxious to make peace with its Arab neighbors. If successful, the current peace process is a potential opportunity for Israel to increase its security, normalize relations with its neighbors, and create a more stable and prosperous Middle East. Resolution of the conflict depends on direct negotiations between the parties based on mutual respect and recognition. The United States’ commitment to Israel must continue so Israel can negotiate with its former and current adversaries from a position of strength… Israel can take risks for peace only because of unwavering American support.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

CityPAC Questionnaire, 2000 Congressional Primary http://www.democrats.org/page/speakout/unfit 2000-03

Peace, History, Support, Success

“O comfortable allurement, O ravishing persuasion to deal with a science whose subject is so ancient, so pure, so excellent, so surrounding all creatures, so used of the almighty and incomprehensible wisdom of the Creator, in distinct creation of all creatures: in all their distinct parts, properties, natures, and virtues, by order, and most absolute number, brought from nothing to the formality of their being and state.”

John Dee (1527–1608) English mathematican, astrologer and antiquary

The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570)

Wisdom, Nature, Science, Parting

“Belafonte sent his people to pick me up and I went back and shook his hand, then went back to my little flat. I was very happy to have met a president of the United States - little me!”

Miriam Makeba (1932–2008) South African singer and civil rights activist

Interview with Robin Denselow (May 2008)
Source: Denselow, Robin, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2280144,00.html, Robin Denselow talks to African superstar and activist Miriam Makeba, The Guardian, 15, London, 16 May 2008, 18 November 2010

Happiness, People

“Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's "bold new imaginative" program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx — first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy."”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

In a 1960 letter to the GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon, quoted in Matthew Dallek's The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (2000), p. 38
1960s

Age, Way, Imagination, Idea

“When the Jew says "mankind" he is talking about himself. It is written in the Talmud, that only Jews were human beings, gentiles on the other hand were animals created to serve the chosen people.
If looking back and comparing the corresponding articles in the "democratic" and "neutral" countries, one is astonished at the systematic nature of the propaganda whose final goal was the creation of a state of affairs in which a war was inevitable.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Mit der "Menschheit" meint nämlich der Jude sich selbst, die Gesamtheit der Juden. Steht doch im Talmud geschrieben, dass nur die Juden Menschen seien, die Nichtjuden dagegen Tiere, die dazu erschaffen wurden, damit sie dem auserwählten Volk der Juden besser dienen könnten.
Vergleicht man zurückschauend die darauf bezüglichen Artikel in den "demokratischen" und "neutralen" Ländern, dann staunt man über die Planmäßigkeit jener Propaganda, deren Endziel die Schaffung eines Zustandes war, der zwangsläufig zum Krieg führen musste.
Stürmer, September 5, 1940

War, People, Nature, Animals

“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Section 56
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Happiness, Law, Way, Exercises

“During his illness, Lenin repeatedly addressed letters and proposals to the leading bodies and congresses of the party. It must be definitely stated that all these letters and suggestions were invariably delivered to their destination and they were all brought to the knowledge of the delegates to the Twelfth and Thirteenth Congresses, and have invariably exercised their influence on the decisions of the party. If all of these letters have not been published, it is because their author did not intend them to be published. Comrade Lenin has not left any “Testament”; the character of his relations to the party, and the character of the party itself, preclude the possibility of such a “Testament.” The bourgeois and Menshevik press generally understand under the designation of “Testament” one of Comrade Lenin’s letters (which is so much altered as to be almost unrecognizable) in which he gives the party some organizational advice. The Thirteenth Party Congress devoted the greatest attention to this and to the other letters, and drew the appropriate conclusions. All talk with regard to a concealed or mutilated “Testament” is nothing but a despicable lie, directed against the real will of Comrade Lenin and against the interests of the party created by him.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/07/lenin.htm,Letter on Max Eastman's Book, July 1, 1925

Lie, Exercises, Understanding, Knowledge

“I have come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, A New Beginning (June 2009)

Truth, World, Justice

“We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissable, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?”

Friedrich Schiller book On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Letter 2
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Age, Decision

“On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because of the Supreme Court’s decision. You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent sociological considerations.”

James Eastland (1904–1986) American politician

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965, by Juan Williams, Viking Penguin, January 1, 1987, <nowiki>ISBN 978-0-670-81412-1</nowiki>, p. 38.
On August 12, 1955 in Senatobia, Mississippi, about the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. The Board of Education, which found racial segregation in the public schools unconstitutional
Unsourced

Decision

“The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

As quoted in Dirac: A Scientific Biography (1990), by Helge Kragh, p. 258
Source: [Kragh, Helge, Dirac: A Scientific Biography, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zXm1Bso1VREC&pg=PA258&lpg=PA258&dq=%22The+aim+of+science+is+to+make+difficult+things+understandable+in+a+simpler+way;+the+aim+of+poetry+is+to+state+simple+things+in+an+incomprehensible+way.+The+two+are+incompatible%22&source=bl&ots=OLeGFpZGCh&sig=VRga1I7FVl9UBpXi_oAq_-8u_ls&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjBwLbbwdvVAhXIIMAKHZ_pCZQQ6AEIOTAD#v=onepage&q=%22The%20aim%20of%20science%20is%20to%20make%20difficult%20things%20understandable%20in%20a%20simpler%20way%3B%20the%20aim%20of%20poetry%20is%20to%20state%20simple%20things%20in%20an%20incomprehensible%20way.%20The%20two%20are%20incompatible%22&f=false, March 30, 1990, 258, December 6, 2017]

Way, Understanding, Science

“If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

History and Politics http://books.google.com/books?id=7I82AAAAIAAJ&q=&quot;If+the+state+is+strong+it+crushes+us+If+it+is+weak+we+perish&quot; as translated by D. Folliot and J. Mathews (1971)

Strong

“Vermont is a small state which makes an enormous difference.”

Fred Rogers (1928–2003) American television personality

Commencement Address at Middlebury College May, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20030906163501/http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/pubaff/general_info/addresses/Fred_Rogers_2001.htm

“These lectures have shown very clearly the difference between Roger and me. He's a Platonist and I'm a positivist. He's worried that Schrödinger's cat is in a quantum state, where it is half alive and half dead. He feels that can't correspond to reality. But that doesn't bother me. I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don't know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements. Quantum theory does this very successfully. It predicts that the result of an observation is either that the cat is alive or that it is dead. It is like you can't be slightly pregnant: you either are or you aren't.”

Stephen Hawking book The Nature of Space and Time

During a debate with Roger Penrose in 1994 at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, transcribed in The Nature of Space and Time (1996) by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, p. 121 http://books.google.com/books?id=LstaQTXP65cC&lpg=PP1&dq=nature%20of%20space%20and%20time&pg=PA121#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Feeling, Cats, Reality, Dead

“Oh troika, winged troika, tell me who invented you? Surely, nowhere but among a nimble nation could you have been born in a country which has taken itself in earnest and has evenly spread far and wide over half of the globe, so that once you start counting the milestones you may count on till a speckled haze dances before your eyes… Rus, are you not similar in your headlong motion to one of those nimble troikas that none can overtake? The flying road turns into smoke under you, bridges thunder and pass, all fall back and is left behind!… And what does this awesome motion mean? What is the passing strange steeds! Has the whirlwind a home in your manes?… Rus, whither are you speeding to? Answer me. No answer. The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy; the roaring air is torn to pieces and becomes wind; all things on earth fly by and other nations and states gaze askance as they step aside and give her the right of way.”

Nikolai Gogol book Dead Souls

Vol. I, ch. 11
Dead Souls (1842)

Dreams, Way, Home, Dance

“… to put an end to the epidemics, we were forced to burn the bodies of an incalculable number of people who were destroyed by the disease. So we were forced to build crematoria, and on this account they are loosing a bond for us. "He also stated that he punished the culprit if the atrocities occurred in the camps." On the Einsatzgruppen: "The war on the Eastern front made the demands more difficult for our soldiers. A terrible climate, never-ending distances, an enemy population and constantly apparent partisans. Just because it was difficult, the troops prevailed. So they were forced to destroy entire villages if there was resistance and gunfire from such a village. Russians are not ordinary enemies, we can not understand their mentality. In the most desperate situations, they would refuse to capitulate. If, because of these difficulties in the East, the Jewish people suffered large casualties, it must be remembered that the German people also suffered severely."”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

April 20, 1945 in a meeting with Norbert Masur, a representative of the World Jewish Congress.

War, People, Disease, Understanding

Quotes about state page 7

Quotes about state
page 7