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State Quotes

Browse 209 quotes about State.

State Quotes

“The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It's not an inspiration; it's a threat.”

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Author:Lew Rockwell
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“Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.”

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Book:The Blind Giant
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“І раптом мені стукнула в голову егоїстична, по-романтичному зухвала думка — про своєрідне відшкодування. Його ж таки треба вділяти соратникам, які жертвують своє найсокровенніше задля Держави. Відплачувати їм треба найвищим і найціннішим із усього, чого тільки можна запрагнути, — славою й почестями. Якщо слава й почесті служать достатньою втіхою покаліченому на війні солдатові, то чом би їм не послужити в такий самий спосіб людині, покаліченій внутрішньо?”

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Book:Kallocain
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“The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged 'services' and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.”

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Author:Robert Higgs
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“Theoretically, if each state accepted the universal protection of human rights, individuals and groups could survive and flourish under any regime and in any condition. This would suit the leading powers in the West who have the most vested in protecting the international “world order” status quo. But there is no agreement on which human rights are the essential rights, and states by the very way in which they are supposed to operate resist external intrusions into what they deem to be their internal affairs. On the other hand, when it is self-serving, all states are quick to take up the cause of the human rights of another state’s citizens. Thus, there is a natural tension between the ideas of non-interference with the internal workings of another state, and human rights. Besides internal pressures from disaffected groups,”

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Book:The Case for a Larger Israel
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“The societal and political manifestation of disbelief (of belief that we make ourselves and are only what we make ourselves) is, of course, the world of liberal individualism - the world of isolated individuals asserting their freedom against each other. And, of course, if this is what society is like, you need a state whose job it is to control and limit the freedom of its citizens. The world that believes in the autonomous free individual also has to believe in the bureaucratic state. Society is seen as a perpetual struggle between these two - sometimes emphasizing the individual, sometimes the collective. But all this is the world of disbelief, the world without God.”

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Book:Faith Within Reason
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“The more static, standardized, and uniform a population or social space is, the more legible it is, and the more amenable it is to the techniques of state officials. I am suggesting that many state activities aim at transforming the population, space, and nature under their jurisdiction into the closed systems that offer no surprises and that can best be observed and controlled.”

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Book:Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
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“WE WERE FREE. THEY GAVE US CITIZENSHIP हुकुमतों ने सारी ज़मीं आपस में बाँट ली, वले हम भी किसी टुकड़े पे बैठे थे किसी के हो गए (विनीत) HUKUMATO.N NE SAARI ZAMEE.N AAPAS MEIN BAANT LI, VALE HUM BHEE KISI TUKDEY PEY BAITHE THEI, KISEE KE HO GAYE THE EMPIRES DIVIDED UP ALL THE EXISTING LAND AMONGST THEMSELVES I WAS ALSO SITTING SOMEPLACE AND A NATION BECAME MY OWNER”

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Author:Vineet Raj Kapoor
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“Beware! Abstain from shedding blood without a valid cause. There is nothing more harmful than this which brings about one’s ruin. The blood that is willfully shed shortens the life of a state. On the Day of Judgement it is this crime for which one will have to answer first. So, beware! Do not wish to build the strength of your state on blood for, it is this blood which ultimately weakens the state and passes it into other hands. Before me and my God no excuse for willful killing can be entertained.”

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Author:Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S
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“New laws are always being passed but they alter almost nothing. Their real purpose is, precisely, to engender debate, to give the people of Italy a chance to express a lively opposition to the state so unanimous that it actually creates a supportive atmosphere of unity and national well-being. Everyone feels the state is fleecing them, treating them unfairly, so that feeling cheated by the state - and finding some small ways of cheating the state - turns out to be the cement that binds the nation together. In this way, the state is sacrificed to the idea of the nation.”

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Book:Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence
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“Love is dangerous because it makes you an individual. And the state and the church . . . they don’t want individuals, not at all. They don’t want human beings, they want sheep. They want people who only look like human beings but whose souls have been crushed so utterly, damaged so deeply, that it seems almost irreparable.”

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Book:Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously
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“Seating himself crosslegged on a bale of straw, he formed the image of a flame in his mind and fed emotion into it, hate, fear, everything, every scrap, until it seemed that he floated in emptiness. After years of practice, achieving ko'di, the oneness, needed less than a heartbeat. Thought and even his own body seemed distant, but in this state he was more aware than usual, becoming one with the bale beneath him, the stable, the scabbarded sword folded behind him. He could 'feel' the horses, cropping at their mangers, and flies buzzing in the corners. They were all part of him. Especially the sword. This time, though, it was only the emotionless void that he sought.”

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Book:New Spring
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“A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.”

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Book:After Dark
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“A society like the Italian, the very disorder of which renders the action of the State useless and ridiculous, is not without its charm and helps us to grasp this political truth: the principal task of the State today is to justify its own existence. To do so, it has to annihilate society's capacity to survive by itself. Surreptitiously undermining all forms of spontaneous regulation, deregulating, desocializing, breaking down the traditional mechanisms of bodies and antibodies, in order to substitute its artificial mechanisms - such is the strategy of a State locked in a subtle struggle with society - exactly like medicine, which lives off the destruction of natural defences and their replacement by artificial ones. In Rome, Niccolini manages to counter the obsessive fear of terrorism with a cultural revival. To the Romans who no longer dare go out in the evenings he offers festivals, performances, poetry galas. He brings culture down into the street. He combats the terrorist festival with the cultural, advertising festival. He will be criticized for wasteful expenditure, but the only way to fight terrorism is not to create 'solid' institutions, but to put upon the stage a culture that is as sacrificial, eccentric, and ephemeral as the terrorist acts themselves. One festival against the other. If terrorism is a sort of murderous advertising campaign which keeps our imagination on tenterhooks, it can be countered only by a piece of even more effective advertising.”

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Book:Cool memories
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“Culture' is, in sum, at an historical turning point. Emerging in the late nineteenth century as an abstract analytical and political concept, explicitly associated with concepts of inequality, and still now a useful component in the production and reproduction of state power, it seems to be increasingly shaken loose from its rootedness in the state, as difference comes to be directly produced by the policies and practices of state, without invoking culture.”

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Book:Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina
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