Quotes About State

Voluntary communism, together with laissez-faire capitalism, has nothing to be ashamed of on moral and economic grounds. They can each hold up their heads, high. Far from enemies, they are merely opposite sides of the same voluntaristic coin. Together, they must battle state coercion, whether called State Capitalism or State Socialism. The point is, "left" vs. "right" is a red herring. The reddest and perhaps most misleading red herring in all political-economic theory.

I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality

That was back when state governments valued education and realized the economic and social value of making it affordable.

A good painter has two chief objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul; the former is easy, the latter hard, because he has to represent it by the attitudes and movements of the limbs…The most important consideration in painting is that the movements of each figure expresses its mental state, such as desire, scorn, anger, pity, and the like. - quoted from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks

This wariness of authority reflected the most fundamental of all of Einstein's moral principles: Freedom and individualism are necessary for creativity and imagination to flourish. He had demonstrated this as an impertinent young thinker, and he proclaimed the principle clearly in 1931. "I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality," he said.69

To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.

adversity bends the heart as fire bends the stubborn steel, and those who are no longer their own governors, and the denizens of their own free independent state, must crouch before strangers.

Each of these companies will devote its entire efforts to a single state seeking to bring the agents and insureds of its area a combination of large company capability and small company accessibility and sensitivity.

Heaven is a state of mind, not a location.

Immobilization: A state, however mild or serious, in which you are not functioning at the level that you would like to. If feelings lead to such a state, you need to look no further for a reason to get rid of them.

If you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state, then a single-payer system is the next best alternative. Unfortunately, it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing.

Israel is the world's only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation—is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.

It is not just wrong but dangerous to underestimate the rationality of regimes that profess the craziest of ends. The very designation "crazy state" inclines those sure of their own sanity to let down their guard. Europe catastrophically underestimated Hitler because he was plainly a madman. That he was. It did not prevent him from conquering Europe.

The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly--to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state--that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution.

Rather happiness, peace or serenity is our natural state. Beneath all of what we add to our feelings and experience, beneath our self-contraction, lies serenity Itself." (pg. 141).

All systematic civil disobedience should involve acts that are malum prohibitum: illegal because the state says so, not because they are bad in themselves.

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work. —FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK, The Road to Serfdom

16 In 1994, Congress passed the Jacob Wetterling Crimes against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, which effectively required every state to establish a sex offender registry by 1997. 17

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.

Columnist Joseph Sobran writes, "The prevailing notion is that the state should be neutral as to religion, and furthermore, that the best way to be neutral about it is to avoid all mention of it. By this sort of logic, nudism is the best compromise among different styles of dress. The secularist version of 'pluralism' amounts to theological nudism."35

A Christian writer has summed this up well: "The 'Christian state' is one that gives no special public privilege to Christian citizens but seeks justice for all as a matter of principle."6

The New Testament is clear: there is to be no merger of church and state until Christ returns and the kingdoms of this world become 'the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.' As [Francis] Schaeffer writes, we must not 'confuse the kingdom of God with our country... or wrap Christianity in our national flag.

The naked public square cannot remain naked, the direction is toward the state-as-church, toward totalitarianism."6

And so we come full circle, back to where we began. For it is this pervasive sense of impotence that has paved the way for the emergence of political saviors and the all-powerful state that promise salvation through changed structures.