Quotes About State

We live in a state with a wonderful climate and plenty of natural beauty, from the shores of Cumberland Island to the Chattahoochee River to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.

The State is inherently authoritarian. It represents the interests of the rich against the poor. It is run by representatives—self-selected and sharing a similar ideology—ratified by the increasingly diminishing percentage of the population that bothers to vote.

The State is not democratic, in the best sense of the word, but elitist. It is a specialized institution standing above the rest of society, alienated from and oppressing most of the population.

There is a spectrum of resistance possible within a political context. From our commitment to defending each other against arrest at demonstrations, to providing both legal and political defences for people brought to trial, to supporting imprisoned revolutionaries, we believe that our commitment to each other is our strongest defence against the power of the State. We demand the release of all political prisoners and prisoners of war, but we also work for the abolition of the prison system.

One demonstration of the power of the State is the fact that it has so colonized our imaginations as to make itself seem natural, leaving us unable to think of a different way. Yet for the majority of human existence we have lived without the State.

As anarchists, we see State reforms as positive, opening up new space for action. We do not sit back complacently when reforms are won.

The State is not an instrument of liberation. For this reason we oppose strategies for social change that rely on the power of the State. Whether it is participating in elections, petitioning those in power, or trying to seize State power, we see such strategies as self-defeating.

In fact, every major State reform has come in response to the strength and power of grassroots movements.

The State is born of the conquest of other people. The self-governing community is a creation of the people themselves in the process of overthrowing the State.

Modem science, then, maintains on the one hand that nature, both organic and inorganic, strives towards a state of order and that man's actions are governed by the same tendency.

And just as the functions of the bodily organs of plants and animals cannot be arbitrarily altered, so that, for example, one cannot at will hear with his eyes and see with his ears, so also one cannot at pleasure transform an organ of social oppression into an instrument for the liberation of the oppressed. The state can only be what it is: the defender of mass exploitation and social privileges, the creator of privileged classes and castes and of new monopolies.

Just as you cannot see, at pleasure, with your ears and you cannot, at will, hear with your eyes so too you cannot make the state act in the interests of the working people. As an organ in the social body, its purpose is for the repression of self-determination.

Winston Churchill wrote: "There is no doubt that this persecution of the Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the biggest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe.

There was a state without king or nobles; there was a church without a bishop; there was a people governed by grave magistrates which it had selected, and by equal laws which it had framed.

Happiness is an elusive state of mind not to be gained by clumsy pursuit.It is given to those who do not sue for it:to be unconcerned about a desired good is probably the only way to possess it.

It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good—so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone's hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.

The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.

The Holy Land became a police state. The British brought in more troops, until there were one hundred thousand soldiers. Some of the Black and Tan policemen, who had once suppressed the Irish, were sent to Palestine to keep order.

There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God.

In other countries, the bureaucracy serves the needs of the people and the state; here, the bureaucracy itself is primary, and it takes precedence over the needs of the people and the state.

Love? Is that what they call this detestable physical state? The cold sweats, the pounding heart, the absolutely choking fear that I might have to live without her?...Then it's a damned nuisance, and I was right to be against it all this time. Good God, I don't think I could go through this more than once in a lifetime

Samadhi is a state of equanimity where the intellect goes beyond its normal function of discrimination. This in turn loosens one from this physical body. A space between what is you and your body is created. Death means the physical body is completely lost. There is no contact with the physical body. Samadhi means that the physical body is intact, but the contact with the physical body has become very minimal.

Interestingly, scientific experiments today show that if you create an energy pattern outside a chamber in a vacuum state, virtual protons and virtual neutrons will begin to appear. That means, to put it simply, that something is taking form from nothing.