#tate

The present danger which this country faces is at least as great as the danger which we faced during the war with Germany and Japan. Briefly stated, it is the very real danger that this country, as we know it, may cease to exist. ↗

— James Forrestal

#cease #cease to exist #country #danger #during

By giving full expression to the contradiction between civil society and the state, the French Revolution radically transformed both its terms. To put it differently: dualism was not abolished but, rather, displaced within the space delimited by the two poles of the contradiction. This created a new split between 'man', a member of civil society, and the 'citizen', a member of the state. It is only by 'abstracting' from his condition as man and his insertion into the organization of civil society that the political subject can become a citizen and make his entry into the political community: it is only as a 'sheer, blank individual' who accepts the fact that the political is divorced from the social that he can take part in the life of the state, which is based on the freedom and equality of its citizens. (...) The political state is 'abstract' in the sense suggested by the etymology of the word; it appears as the residue or the 'precipitate' of the constitutive movement by means of which civil society transcends its own limits to attain political existence, while leaving its internal differences intact, or, rather, transforming them into mere 'differences of social life' 'without significance in political life'. The state is incapable of substantially affecting the contents of civil society, for it is, precisely, a product of civil society's abstraction from itself. ↗

— Stathis Kouvelakis

#marxism #state #equality

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#belligerent #disgrace #every #individual #itself

Today's difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal. ↗

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

#criminal #difference #else #everybody #everybody else

I'd rather see the United States as a beacon of good work and good citizenship, rather than as #1 on some international educational measurement. ↗

— Howard Gardner

#citizenship #educational #good #good work #i

There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. ↗

— James A. Garfield

#states #united #united states

The head of the CIA, it seems to me, would think long and hard before he admitted that former employees of his had been involved in the murder of the President of the United States-even if they weren't acting on behalf of the Agency when they did it. ↗

— Jim Garrison

#admitted #agency #been #before #behalf

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep. ↗

— Quentin Crisp

#decency #even #exhausting #maintain #more

I don't want a lot of bureaucracy... I want to run state government the same way we run a campaign - efficient, effective and victorious. ↗

— Charlie Crist

#campaign #effective #efficient #government #i

Had it not been for the Atlantic Ocean and the virgin wilderness, the United States would never have been the Land of Promise. ↗

— Herbert Croly

#atlantic ocean #been #had #land #never