The State Quotes

War made the state, and the state made war

~ Charles Tilly

He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight the war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn't fight.

~ Dalton Trumbo

The purpose of the state is really freedom.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.

~ Kollontai Alexandra

Thus the successful bid to gain access to marriage effectively strengthens marital status as a state-sanctioned condition for the exercise of certain kinds of rights and entitlements, it strengthens the hand of the state in the regulation of human sexual behavior, and it emboldens the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of partnership and kinship.

~ Judith Butler

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

~ Charles Péguy

[Paul] has no intention to instruct the Christian community about the task and responsibility of government. His entire concern is with the responsibility of the Christian community towards the State.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Systems of retributive justice work well as long as they are proportional. However, in complex societies, where the State is the arbiter of justice, proportionality may break down: offences created by the elite few become offences against the entire community.

~ Daniel Waterman

Patriotism is the product of successful systematic indoctrination.

~ Dane Whalen

But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

~ Albert Camus

The law itself was originally created in order to protect property. However, the law has been falsely attributed to being the reason property exists in the first place. At least, this is what the state would have us believe. The law does not create property rights because these already existed before the law was created. It is this false attribution that allows the state apparatus to conduct its mission of expropriation.

~ Daniel Alexander Brackins

Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.

~ Peter Watts