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“War made the state, and the state made war”
― Charles Tilly

“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”
― Charles Péguy

“The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protected and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

“The purpose of the state is really freedom.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise

“He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight the war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn't fight.”
― Dalton Trambo

“From this state also will he flee. If I should attempt to enumerate them one by one, I should not find a single one which could tolerate the wise man or which the wise man could tolerate.”
― Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.”
― Kollontai Alexandra, La Oposición Obrera

“But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Patriotism is the product of successful systematic indoctrination.”
― Dane Whalen

“...nothing stands so much in the way of the production and propagation of the great philosopher by nature as does the bad philosopher who works for the state.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

“One day you will see that it is a mistake to love an empire, or a throne, or a crown, because those things cannot love. They can only die.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.

Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual’s reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called ‘freedom��; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lecciones de Estetica

“The fact is that power is as ubiquitous as gravity. Just as gravity is one of the forces that hold the universe together, so power is one of the forces that hold any society together. A defining feature of any society—whether it is tribal, slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist, communist, or even anarchist—is not whether power is being exercised but how. To argue that social power as such is somehow wrong or “evil�� is fallacious. What counts is whether it belongs to the people, and by what kind of institutions is it being exercised.”
― Murray Bookchin

“Wars are terrible, but necessary, for they save the state from social petrification and stagnation”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Q: Doesn't this open up the possibility of overcoming the dualism of political struggles that eternally feed on the opposition between the state, on the one hand, and revolution, on the other? Doesn't it indicate a wider field of conflicts than that where the adversary is the state?

Foucault: I would say that the state consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations that render its functioning possible, and that revolution is a different type of codification of the same relations.”
― Michel Foucault

“Under the modern Establishment, the function of the state has been reconfigured. Now, it exists to support private interests, including sectors - like the City - which have nothing but contempt for the state.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“The law itself was originally created in order to protect property. However, the law has been falsely attributed to being the reason property exists in the first place. At least, this is what the state would have us believe. The law does not create property rights because these already existed before the law was created. It is this false attribution that allows the state apparatus to conduct its mission of expropriation.”
― Daniel Alexander Brackins, Private Property, Law, and the State

“The only way for the state to finance its operations is through the forcible expropriation of productive wealth from its citizens.”
― Daniel Alexander Brackins, Private Property, Law, and the State

“For the state is everything here. It nourishes the citizen, raises his children, cares for him, judges and condemns him; and of this state I am merely the first citizen.”
― Marquis de Sade, Aline and Valcour, or, the Philosophical Novel, Vol. II

“The whole history of mankind proves that the state had its origin in class contradictions and conflicts created by the development of tribal society, in the need to 'curb class opposition.' It was precisely this fact that made the state the organ of the authority of the strongest - economically dominant - class which, with the support of the state, thus becomes the most powerful class politically as well.”
― Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky, The Law of the Soviet State

“Systems of retributive justice work well as long as they are proportional. However, in complex societies, where the State is the arbiter of justice, proportionality may break down: offences created by the elite few become offences against the entire community.”
― Daniel Waterman, Entheogens, Society and Law: The Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy and Responsibility

“Thus the successful bid to gain access to marriage effectively strengthens marital status as a state-sanctioned condition for the exercise of certain kinds of rights and entitlements; it strengthens the hand of the state in the regulation of human sexual behavior; and it emboldens the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of partnership and kinship.”
― Judith Butler, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

“When religious law becomes civil law, does the state not cease being secular, and become theocratic or theocentric?”
― Christina Engela, Autumn Burning: Dreadtime Stories for the Wicked Soul

“...the state is not what it once was. It is complicit in this new, shared global reality in which states deregulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss.”
― Zadie Smith

“The grandeur of war lies in the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the state, and it brings out the full magnificence of the sacrifice of fellow countrymen for one another...the love, the friendliness, and the strength of that mutual sentiment”
― Heinrich von Treitschke

“The properly constituted State is the servant of the people at all times, the guarantor of the Commonwealth, and the means through which every citizen is optimized. To oppose the State, as anarchists do, is to oppose the People themselves. The State is the People.”
― Tom Strabo, National Capitalism: How to Save America

“Left Communists, key among them Bukharin, produced the most lucid analysis of how monopoly capitalism led to an increasing intertwining of capitalism with the state, and how this was the roots of imperialism”
― Jock Dominie, Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left

“What thus emerged from the Russian Revolution was a new model of state capitalism which, in turn, would become attractive to the bourgeoisie of “backward�� countries and colonies of the Western colonial powers (like Cuba, Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, etc.). They could use the State to keep Western multinationals from bleeding the country dry, and try to “develop�� independently through state mobilisation of the population. Devoid of real proletarian initiative, this was a flawed model, and even the Communist Party of the Chinese People’s Republic abandoned Stalinism after the death of Mao by setting up Special Economic Zones to attract international capital and build a new Chinese capitalist class (so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics��). What they have in fact returned to is the type of state capitalism that Lenin advocated in 1918, opposed by the Left Communists of that time. Across the world many workers in the former Eastern European bloc still think it was better than what they have now. But neither “state capitalism�� nor “state socialism�� are socialism as understood by Marx. Both depend on the exploitation of workers whose surplus value is the basis for capitalist profit and who have no actual political say in the system.”
― Jock Dominie, Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left

“The wealthy can quite easily convert their cash into political influence, and politicians and bureaucrats are quite capable of turning their political influence into cash. In the UK -as in most other capitalist countries- the links between the public and private sectors have become so close that it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

But these privileges are not available to everyone. For people like Lex Greensill, the British state appears extremely porous. He can write to politicians directly, requesting help and support, as well as hiring former civil servants -and even former prime ministers- to do his dirty work for him. But to organize like unions that lobby on behalf of workers -not to mention people trying to petition the government themselves- the British state seems impenetrable.

The different versions of state power experienced by more and less powerful actors tell us something about what the state actually is. Rather than a fixed set of stable institutions, the state is a social relation, like capital itself.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom