Quotes About State

The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; ie, by people relating to one another differently.

Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.

It is better," says Eckhard, "to look at the wall. You look at the wall, you have your own thoughts. You look at he TV, you have the thoughts of the state.

Interstate highways are the veins and arteries by which crime circulates in America. Serial killers seem to float through them like blood cells, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Crimes committed along interstate highways ought to be considered extraterritorially, apart from the normal rules of geography, and separate from a state's good name. These huge highways form a kind of fifty-first state of their own, a state whose flower is the deadly nightshade and whose state bird is the vulture.

All the medical examiners in the state of Florida are forensic pathologists with medical degrees.

In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.

War always changes. Our enemies learn and adapt, and we must do the same or lose. But today, war is changing faster and on a larger scale than at any time in the last 350 years. Not only are we facing rapid change in how war is fought, we are facing radical changes in who fights and what they are fighting for. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting non-state opponents. This kind of war, which we call Fourth Generation war, or 4GW, is a very difficult challenge.

When a state's armed service is given a mission to intervene in a Fourth Generation conflict, its first objective must be to keep its own footprint as small as possible. This is an important way to minimize the contradiction between the physical and moral levels of war. The smaller the state's physical presence, the fewer negative effects it will have at the moral level.

The fact that the root of Fourth Generation war is a political, social, and moral phenomenon, the decline of the state, means there can be no purely military solution to Fourth Generation threats. Military force is incapable, by itself, of restoring legitimacy to a state.

War always changes. Our enemies learn and adapt, and we must do the same or lose. But today, war is changing faster and on a larger scale than at any time in the last 350 years. Not only are we facing rapid change in how war is fought, we are facing radical changes in who fights and what they are fighting for. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting non-state opponents.

Finally, despite a policy of de-escalation, there will inevitably be situations where state forces do need to escalate. When that happens, we again stress that it must be over fast. To return to Martin van Creveld's analogy, an adult can get away with giving a kid one good whack in public. He cannot administer a prolonged beating. Once the escalation terminates, state forces must make every effort to demonstrate that de-escalation remains their policy.

Fourth Generation opponents demands the opposite: close integration with the local populace. Instead of making state forces less secure, integration will improve their security over the long run. The reason is that just as troops protect the local people, so the local people will protect them.

At the heart of this phenomenon, Fourth Generation war,4 lies not a military evolution but a political, social, and moral revolution: a crisis of legitimacy of the state. All over the world, citizens of states are transferring their primary allegiance away from the state to other entities: to tribes, ethnic groups, religions, gangs, ideologies, and "causes." Many people who will no longer fight for their state are willing to fight for their new primary loyalty.

At the most powerful level of war, the moral level, the key to victory is to convince the local people to identify with the state, or at least to acquiesce to it, rather than identifying with non-state entities.

The value of government to the people it serves is in direct relationship to the interest citizens themselves display in the affairs of state.

For greatest scandal waits on greatest state.

But in the gross and scope of my opinion,This bodes some strange eruption to our state.

For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth bringsThat then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Between the acting of a dreadful thingAnd the first motion, all the interim isLike a phantasma, or a hideous dream:The genius and the mortal instrumentsAre then in council; and the state of man,Like to a little kingdom, suffers thenThe nature of an insurrection.

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted deadDid squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.

An old man, broken with the storms of state,Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;Give him a little earth for charity.

The ecclesiastics were, practically speaking, surrogates of the State.

Moscow State University."4 MGU was to the USSR what Harvard is to the United States—except that in the Soviet Union there was almost nothing else, no Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, no Ivy League, no equally distinguished state universities, no elite liberal arts colleges. Moscow the city was itself unique:

We cannot possibly permit it, either as Communists or internationalists, or as the Soviet state. We would have capitalists on the frontier of the Soviet Union.