Quotes about the state

Crimes are what the state defines as crimes.

"It can't be an easy thing," Lucas said, "to make a country. It's tough enough to make a café. Or to make one be the way you imagined it. Unless you only let certain people in and keep the rest out."

"The better organized the state, the duller its humanity."

Unlike every other other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.

"All systems are evil. All governments are evil. Not just a trifle evil. Monstrously evil."

Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.

Government in reality, as has abundantly appeared, is a question of force, and not of consent. It is desirable that a government should be made as agreeable as possible to the ideas and inclinations of its subjects and that they should be consulted, as extensively as may be, respecting its construction and regulations. But, at last, the best constituted government that can be formed particularly for a large community, will contain many provisions that, far from having obtained the consent of all its members, encounter even in their outset a strenuous, thought ineffectual opposition.

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but it offers new occasions and temptations for the commission of it.

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

“Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”

“Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.”

Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.