State Quotes

Democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll. The state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display, multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish.

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.

States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them

Preparation for defense is an inalienable prerogative of a sovereign state.

[Maxim] Litvinov signed his letter not in private capacity but as representative of the state, just as did President [Franklin] Roosevelt. Their agreement represents an agrement between two states. Signing this agreement both Litvinov and President Roosevelt as therepresentatives of two states have in mind the activities of the agents of those states who should not and will not interfere in each other's internal affairs.

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters, and coldly it tells lies, and this lie drones on from its mouth: 'I, the State, am the people'.

The state machine, including the army, the police and the courts, is the instrument with which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument of oppression against all hostile classes; it means violence and is certainly not anything 'benevolent.' 'You are merciless.' Quite so. We definitely do not adopt a benevolent policy towards the reactionary activities of the reactionaries and the reactionary classes.

Rights of true citizenship accrue only to those who serve the State to which they belong.

The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in thegreat sense, and men, serve the state with their conscience also,and so necessarily resist it for the most part, and they arecommonly treated as enemies by it.

The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace...but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.

The root of the kingdom is in the state. The root of the state is in the family. The root of the family is in the person of its head.

This little world, this little state, this little commonwealth of our own.

Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

The difference between acting badly or brilliantly is not based on your ability, but on the state of your mind and/or body in any given moment.

The true wealth of a state consists in the number of its inhabitants, in their toil and industry.

Whatever the State saith is a lie; whatever it hath is a theft: all is counterfeit in it, the gnawing, sanguinary, insatiate monster.

The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.

Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

Put yourself in a state of mind where you say to yourself

To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large.

When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.

Let me give you my vision: A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country, and on that freedom all of our other freedoms depend.

From the State the exceptional individual cannot expect much. He is seldom benefited by being taken into its service; the only certain advantage it can give him is complete independence. Only real culture will prevent him being too early tired out or used up, and will spare him the exhausting struggle against culture-philistinism.

What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?[Lat., Quod enim munus reiplicae afferre majus, meliusve possumus, quam si docemus atque erudimus juventutem?]