Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.
Plato

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

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
Karl Marx

Our forces saved the remnants of the Jewish people of Europe for a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with all men of good will, I salute the young state and wish it well.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
Leo Tolstoy

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
Leo Tolstoy

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
Leo Tolstoy

To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.
Jane Austen

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.
Niccolo Machiavelli

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.
Niccolo Machiavelli

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.
Douglas MacArthur

A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.
Lord Byron

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Blaise Pascal

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.
James Madison

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.
James Madison

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Noam Chomsky

Faith is a state of openness or trust.
Alan Watts