Quotes About State

The genealogy of the modern redistributive state—with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics—can be traced back not to any sort of "primitive communism" but ultimately to violence and war.

státní aparát [...] skupina lidí, kteÃ…â"¢í si jako jediní osobují právo - alespo? tehdy, když jsou ve své oficiální roli - používat násilí.

Whatever the case, the closest Hobbes himself came to suggesting this state really existed was when he noted how the only people who weren't under the ultimate authority of some king were the kings themselves, and they always seemed to be at war with one another.

Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called 'the people' (or 'the nation'), that bureaucracies exist for the benefit of said 'people', and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as 'democracy', most often in the form of national elections.

If it is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state (as it evidently was); and if it's equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state (as it also appears to be), then what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a 'state' and another isn't?

This is why the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his licence to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.

If 'the state' means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.

It reflected the belief that a largely uncontrolled capitalism such as existed in America might be ruinous for Japan, that without sufficient controls too few men would become too rich in too poor a nation. That would create intolerable tensions and divisions, so the state and the capitalists themselves had to regulate it.

Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

Powerful corporations in alliance with an interventionist state were seen to be running the world in individually oppressive and socially unjust ways.

the state never voted for a Whig candidate for President

Lebanonization') become an official part of the French language, defined in the latest editions of Larousse as 'a process of fragmentation of a state, as a result of confrontation between diverse communities', and 'tending to replace "balkanisation"'.

study of human nature was in a sorry state. While he had reservations about the ancient philosophers for depending 'more on Invention than Experience', he found modern philosophers –

Conflict through the ages has not been between opposites, but versions of the same state of mind: the desire to control others.

How can you turn a human relationship into something regulated by the state? How can someone be expected to commit themselves at the age of 20 or 25 to another person for the rest of their lives? Who knows what lies ahead or how the two will change in their attitude to life and each other? The whole idea is crazy.

It was the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Germany that gave Hitler his biggest headaches. His early years of power were marked by futile attempts to reconcile the thirty warring Protestant factions and bring them under one overriding authority, some loosely constituted council of churches that would unquestioningly accept the primacy of the state and the Nazi policies it enforced.

One of the most important weapons in Hitler's police state was controlled however by Hermann Göring, not Himmler. This was the Forschungsamt, or 'Research Office,' set up in 1933 with a monopoly on all wiretapping operations.

in an act of ironic magnanimity that he was to repeat in 1944 after the failed Bomb Plot, Hitler ordered state pensions provided for the next-of-kin of the people murdered in the Night of the Long Knives, as June 30, 1934 came to be known.

Affairs of state tend to drive most presidents toward the center on both foreign and domestic policy, no matter where on the political spectrum they begin, and especially so in the areas of intelligence and law enforcement.

On their way to jail, to deportation from the country, or to expulsion from school, those who confront the muscle of the state frequently see their rights bruised, their liberties wounded. This book is about some of those people. Therefore, it is about all of us.

At Disney World, membership in a union does not guarantee discernible perks. Employees who don't pay dues are entitled to the same pay and benefits as those who do, since Florida is a "right-to-work" state—or "right-to-freeload," as union members charge.

No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God's revelation.

Thank God, under our Constitution there was no connection between church and state.

A judge should be evaluated by whether he faithfully upholds his oath to God, not to the people, to the state or to the Constitution.