Quotes About State

I spent the past two decades wondering why France, as a country managed in a top-down manner by an oversized state, could fare so well in so many fields. It is the country of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, after all, the grand dreamer of a state that infiltrates everything. Indeed the current culture is ultra-interventionist, sort of "if it ain't broke, fix it.

They refuse the notion of design by a creator who knows everything, while, at the same time, want to impose human design as if they knew all the consequences. In general, the more people worship the sacrosanct state (or, equivalently, large corporations), the more they hate skin in the game. The more they believe in their ability to forecast, the more they hate skin in the game. The more they wear suits and ties, the more they hate skin in the game.

A escala federal, soy liberal; a escala estatal, republicano; a escala local, demócrata; y con mi familia y mis amigos, socialista.

Midville's best street was High Street. It was up on a hill. Not much of a hill, to tell the truth, but in that part of the state, the flat south-central part, hills are not taken for granted.

Life, for a human being, is a constant process of thought, of motion, of purpose, of achievement; it is not the state of merely not being dead.

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.

How much do you know about the Heartland War?' Connor shrugs. 'It was the last chapter in our history textbook, but we had state testing, so we never got to it.

And all because we longed for healing and happiness—as if happiness is a state of being. But it's not. Happiness is a vector. It's movement. Like my own momentum across the pool, joy can only be defined by the speed at which you're moving away from pain.

we longed for healing and happiness—as if happiness is a state of being. But it's not. Happiness is a vector. It's movement.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Marajó never had the grand public monuments of a Tenochtitlan or a Qosqo, Roosevelt noted, because its leaders "couldn't compel the labor." Nonetheless, she said, Marajó society was "just as orderly and beautiful and complex. The eye-opener was that you didn't need a huge apparatus of state control to have all that.

The successors to both Wari and Tiwanaku combined the former's organizational skills and the latter's sense of design and razzle-dazzle. First came Chimor, then the greatest empire ever seen in Peru. Spread at its greatest extent over seven hundred miles of the coastline, Chimor was an ambitious state that grew maize and cotton by irrigating almost fifty thousand acres around the Moche River (all of modern Peru only reached that figure in 1960). A

As with the Inka, the kings' mummified bodies continued to live opulently in their own homes and could not be displaced; indeed, the mummies were necessary presences at important state occasions. As a result, each new ruler had to build his own palace and acquire the riches necessary to maintain it till the end of time. The system almost guaranteed imperial ambitions and exuberant construction plans.

Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history.

And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state, virtue and the virtuous are dishonored. And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is neglected.

GAS VERSUS PLASMA: In a gas (left), every electron is stuck to an atom. In a plasma (right), the electrons roam free, attracted by nuclei, but not attached to any single nucleus.

Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas.

Identity is theft, don't trust anyone whose state vector hasn't forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.

you've got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives.

An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis.

War made the state, and the state made war

Here is a statement of the obvious: banks with "state" in the name are chartered by the state; those with "national" in their name are chartered by the feds.)

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

This too is a jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. The battle we have begun is never-ending. But it may be too late to wind back the heady rhetoric. We have embarked on a campaign as quixotic as the one mounted to destroy us.