Quotes About State

To deceive the state, strangers, or even associates is accepted, and often applauded as evidence of cleverness.

Germany, in other words, developed both a strong state and rule of law early on, well before it developed accountable government.

The implication is that any successful order needs to suppress the power of kinship through some mechanism that makes the guardians value their ties to the state over their love for their families.

It is only with the development of political institutions like the modern state that humans begin to organize themselves and learn to cooperate in a manner that transcends friends and family. When such institutions break down, we revert to patronage and nepotism as a default form of sociability.

The most modern contemporary bureaucracies were those established by authoritarian states in their pursuit of national security.

War, as we saw in Volume 1, creates incentives for efficient, meritocratic government that ordinary economic activity does not and therefore is one important path to state modernity.

Sequencing therefore matters enormously. Those countries in which democracy preceded modern state building have had much greater problems achieving high-quality governance than those that inherited modern states from absolutist times.

Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralized state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislatures. The nature of the absolutism that was achieved in pre-Bolshevik Russia was qualitatively different from that of either old regime France or Spain, and much closer to the premodern Chinese or Ottoman variants.

Kojève, interpreting Hegel in the 1930s, suggested that the idea of the modern state, once unleashed in the world, would eventually universalize itself because it was so powerful: those facing it would either conform to its dictates or be swallowed up.

Many of the failures attributed to democracy are in fact failures of state administrations that are unable to deliver on the promises made by newly elected democratic politicians to voters who want not just their political rights but good government as well.

China was the first world civilization to create a modern state. But it created a modern state that was not restrained by a rule of law or by institutions of accountability to limit the power of the sovereign.

the real driver of state formation is violence or the threat of violence, making the social contract an efficient rather than a final cause.

Greece thus became one of Europe's first electoral democracies, preceding Britain by a full generation. As in the United States, democracy was established before an indigenous modern state could be created.

If modern science made possible weapons of unprecedented destructiveness like the machine gun and the bomber, modern politics created a state of unprecedented power, for which a new word, totalitarianism, had to be coined.

Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids.

No State government has the right to make war, raise armies, or conclude treaties of peace. These rights," he said, were "expressly conferred upon the Confederate Government." Far from the draft being unconstitutional, he felt that "the volunteering system . . . was extra-constitutional, if not unconstitutional.

Few intellectuals have the independence of mind or the will to oppose either state centralization or militarization.

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself.

If I were asked to state the great objective which Church and State are both demanding for the sake of every man and woman and child in this country, I would say that that great objective is "a more abundant life."

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

Party domination and State leadership are concepts incompatible with one another.

The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else.

The modern principle of representation – that each individual should participate in the state – grew out of the forests of Germany and will eventually dominate the entire modern world (VD I, 533/203).

You are your state of mind. Your state of mind creates your view, or your window, on life.