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