State Power Quotes

“The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.”
― Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians

“The struggle is lost from the beginning, long before the victorious party or army conquers state power and ‘betrays’ its promises. It is lost once power itself seeps into the struggle, once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process, once the negative of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building.”
― John Holloway

“Western capitalist society, and especially my own American society, is one characterized by great inequalities. In any such society, by the nature of the case, the greatest threat to rightful freedom is always the wealth and power of the privileged. The chief task of the state in protecting human freedom should always be to use rightful state coercion to limit the freedom of the powerful and privileged to infringe the rightful freedom of the less privileged and the vulnerable. Political struggles in the modern world are usually fundamentally struggles about whether state power will be used to protect the rightful freedom of all, or instead used to protect the wrongful freedom of the wealthy, powerful, and privileged. Wide social inequality necessarily indicates that these struggles have come out the wrong way, on behalf of the unjust and oppressive freedom of the privileged against the rightful freedom of the majority.”
― Allen W. Wood, The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy

“Ergens ter wereld bestaan nog volken en kudden, doch niet bij ons, mijne broeders: hier vindt men staten.
Staat? Wat is dat? Wellaan! Zet nu de oren open, want thans zeg ik u mijn woord over de dood der volken. Staat beduidt het koudste van alle monsters. Koud is ook zijn leugen; en deze leugen kruipt hem uit de mond: 'Ik, de staat, ben het volk.”
― Friederich Nietzsche

“Staat noem ik dat, waar allen gifdrinkers zijn, goeden en slechten, Staat, waar allen zichzelf verliezen, goeden en slechten. Staat, waar de langzame zelfmoord van allen 'het leven' heet.”
― Friederich Nietzsche

“Legal guarantees of freedom of expression, belief, and worship . . . were, like contemporaneous economic decrees, ways of shrinking certain sources and types of moral policing in favor of increasing state power overall. In much European and colonial law, though with important exceptions, a post-Reformation Christian idea was repurposed so as to make the state itself the guarantor of a wide field of choice.”
― Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life

“Another tried-and-true method for bending subjects to the state's will is inducing guilt. Any increase in private well-being can be attacked as "unconscionable greed, "materialism",, or "excessive affluence." Profit-making can be attacked as "exploitation" and "usury", mutually beneficial exchanges are denounced as selfishness, and somehow, with the conclusion always being drawn that more resources should be siphoned from the private to the public sector. The induced guilt makes the public more ready to do just that. While individual persons tend to indulge in "selfish greed", the failure of the state's rulers to engage in exchanges is supposed to signify their devotion to higher and nobler causes, parasitic predation being apparently morally and aesthetically lofty as compared to peaceful and productive work.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, Anatomy of the State