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“Where do human rights arise, anyway? In the sun, in the moon, in the daily paper, in the conscientious heart? They arise in responsible government. Where does security lie, anyway--security against the thief, the murderer, the footpad? In brotherly love? Not at all. It lies in government. Where does control lie--control of smoking in the theater, of nuclear energy in the planet? Control lies in government, because government is people.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“The United States is regarded by people everywhere as a dream come true, a sort of world state in miniature. Here dwell the world's emigrants under one law, and the law is: Thou shalt not push thy neighbor around. By some curious divinity which in him lies, Man, in this experiment of mixed races and mixed creeds, has turned out more good than bad, more right than wrong, more kind than cruel, and more sinned against than sinning. This is the world's hope and its chance.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“But I believe it is also true that a government committed to the policy of improving the nation by improving the condition of some of the individuals will eventually run into trouble in attempting to distinguish between a national good and a chocolate sundae. … I think that one hazard of the "benefit" form of government is the likelihood that there will be an indefinite extensions of benefits, each new one establishing an easy precedent for the next. Another hazard is that by placing large numbers of people under obligation to their government there will develop a self-perpetuating party capable of supplying itself with a safe majority.”

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Book:One Man's Meat
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“The only condition more appalling, less practical, than world government is the lack of it in this atomic age. Most of the scientists who produced the bomb admit that. Nationalism and the split atom cannot coexist in the planet.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“One of the curious difficulties in the way of world federation is the necessity of developing a planetary loyalty as a substitute for, or a complement to, national loyalty. In the United Nations of the World there will be no foreigner to make fun of, no outsider to feel better than. A citizen of the U.N.W. must take pride in the whole world; that, for some people, is going to be a very large thing to get excited about.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“For the first time in our lives, we can feel the disturbing vibrations of complete human readjustment. Usually the vibrations are so faint as to go unnoticed. This time, they are so strong that even the ending of a war is overshadowed. Today is not so much the fact of the end of a war which engages us. It is the limitless power of the victor. The quest for a substitute for God ended suddenly. The substitute turned up. And who do you suppose it was? It was man himself, stealing God's stuff. We have often complained that the political plans for the new world, as shaped by statesmen, are not fantastic enough. We repeat the complaint. The only conceivable way to catch up with atomic energy is with political energy directed to a universal structure.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“Human rights take shape and meaning when they are associated with representative government involving responsibility and duty. So far, the peace proposals do not include popular representation in the council and the assembly, and the people therefore assume no personal responsibility for anything and will therefore gain no personal rights. Commissions (stop us if we are wrong about this) cannot create human rights.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“A world made one, by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would deprive him of the enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn't know and despising what he has never seen. This would be a severe deprivation, perhaps an intolerable one. The awful truth is, a world government would lack an enemy, and that is a deficiency not to be lightly dismissed. It will take a yet undiscovered vitamin to supply the blood of man with a substitute for national ambition and racial antipathy; but we are discovering new vitamins all the time, and I am aware of that too.”

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Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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