I am the State. Louis XIV, attributed
Big Brother is bullshit. Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s3e7: Big Brother, Showtime 2013
Only in the state does man have a rational existence ... Man owes his entire existence to the state, and has his being within it alone. Whatever worth and spiritual reality he possesses are his solely by virtue of the state. (State & Man & Humanity) W E F Hagel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
The first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated, till it attain years of discretion. John Ruskin, Time and Tide, 1867
The State did not command us, but it is we who command the State. The State did not create us, but we ourselves are creating the State. Adolf Hitler, Triumph of the Will, 1935
The State is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class, used to break the resistance of the adversaries of that class. Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, 1924
The actual work of the state is done behind the scenes, and is carried out by the departments, the chancellories and their staffs. Vladimir Lenin
We must reduce the role of the state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions; they must be responsible, revocable, moderately paid. Vladimir Lenin
The state does not function as we desired. The car does not obey ... It moves as another force wishes. Vladimir Lenin
While the state exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State. Vladimir Lenin
No state can exist without the confidence of the people. Confucius, 551-479 B.C.
By art is created that great leviathan, called a commonwealth or state which is but an artificial man … and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul. Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, Leviathan
An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen. Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion
The people will be crushed under the burden of taxes, loan after loan will be floated; after having drained the present, the State will devour the future. Fredric Bastiat
My idea is that when things are not going so well, the State should come in, but when things are going well, the State should keep out. In other words, it is a policy determined by the state of trade in the country. (State & Trade) Major Gwilym Lloyd George, 1946
The moment war is declared ... the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation ...
The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized ...
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense ...
But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty – or mystic devotion to the State – becomes the major imagined human value ...
In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself wholeheartedly into the cause of war ...
It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States ...
War is the health of the State. Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover. Randolph Bourne, The State, 1918
This bodes some strange eruption to our state. William Shakespeare, Hamlet I i 69
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, –
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole, –
Taken to wife: nor have we herein barr’d
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our thanks.
Now follows, that you know, young Fortinbras,
Holding a weak supposal of our worth,
Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame ... ibid. I ii, Claudius
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. ibid. I iv
The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state ...
The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D Thoreau
In the meantime, what is the point of repeating the old tale as to what the state is becoming? Once the sour critical analysis of sometime ago (Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man), the dark negative utopias (Aldous Huxley, George Orwell) and the protest cries (May 68) are forgotten, and with a near lack of the slightest sense of resistance in civil society, the cobweb of power spins peacefully over our heads, all over the place. Even the dressing room. Joxe Azurmendi, Demokratak eta biolentoak p101
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. Louis D Brandeis, dissenting, New State Ice Co v Liebmann, 285 US 311 1932
We are going down the road to Stateism. Where we will wind up, no one can tell, but if some of the new programs seriously proposed should be adopted, there is danger that the individual – whether farmer, worker, manufacturer, lawyer, or doctor – will soon be an economic slave pulling an oar in the galley of the state. James Francis Byrnes, Great Decisions Must Be Made
A question like the present should be disposed of without undue delay. But a State cannot be expected to move with the celerity of a private business man; it is enough if it proceeds, in the language of the English Chancery, with all deliberate speed. Oliver Wendell Holmes junior, Virginia v West Virginia 222 US 19–20 1911
When one with honeyed words but evil mind
Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state. Euripides, Orestes
Many theocracies, from medieval Rome to modern Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, have managed to be spiritual police states and banana republics at the same time. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p213
A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed. Rene Descartes
Some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified: one is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction; another is their tendency to regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. Noam Chomsky, Failed States audio
Some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified: one is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction; another is their tendency to regards themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. ibid.
Bush planners extended Clinton’s doctrine of control of space for military purposes to ownership of space which may mean instant engagement anywhere in the world. ibid.
The standard observation that the United States stood almost alone in rejecting the Kyoto protocols is correct only if the phrase United States excludes its population which strongly favours the Kyoto pact. ibid.
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company may even have succeeded in causing irreversible damage to Iraq’s oil fields. To support the invasion the fields are being driven to pump more than they should. ibid.
If the United States can maintain its control over Iraq which has the world’s second largest known oil reserves and is located at the heart of the world’s major energy supplies, it will enhance significantly Washington’s strategic power and critical leverage over its major rival in the tripolar world that has been taking shape for the past thirty years. ibid.