Failed State Quotes

#1. Treat the world like a failed state; then you can understand the players needed to fix it.

Cameron Sinclair

#2. We see nation-states collapsing all around us: Libya, Syria, Iraq. We do not want another failed state in our neighborhood, which would rapidly turn into a stronghold for terrorists, as we have seen in Gaza. We do not want tunnels to suburbs of Tel Aviv or missiles pointed at Jerusalem.

Ayelet Shaked

#3. Egypt under Hosni Mubarak had deteriorated to the status of a failed state. We must wipe the slate clean and start again.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#4. The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That's why al Qaeda was there in the first place.

Sebastian Junger

#5. When we toppled [Muammar] Gadhafi in Libya, I think that was a mistake. I think ISIS grew stronger, we had a failed state, and we were more at risk.

Rand Paul

#6. I think a failed state is the responsibility of the people who have made that state fail, and those are generally the people of that country.

Lakhdar Brahimi

#7. We can't afford to see Afghanistan roll backwards into a failed state that could become a base from which terrorist campaigns can be launched anywhere in the world.

Liam Fox

#8. The blow back from the cold war is that a weakened Russia allowed Afghanistan to become a failed state, and then all this weaponry to flow into all these other conflicts. Our greatest triumph has almost fueled our most intractable battle now.

Jon Stewart

#9. Ten years ago, we were seen as a virtually failed state, but today we are a vibrant democracy. You can walk safely through the streets of Bogota these days.

Juan Manuel Santos

#10. We were in opposition to the decision to go to war. But after the war happened, it was clear that you could not sit and look-there would be a breeding ground for terrorism or a new collapsed or failed state named Iraq!

Joschka Fischer

#11. The television was on Florida Cable News. A gray-haired man behind the anchor desk reported near tragedy at a state motor vehicle office, where a man who had failed the eye exam pulled a gun and fired fifteen shots at the staff, hitting nobody.

Tim Dorsey

#12. If left unattended by nonvigilant citizens, the freedoms of democracy can be lost to an all-powerful state, and citizens can become transformed into subjects of the government they failed to keep in check.

Christine Barbour

#13. In the classic outline of a failed coup, the plotters had sought to oust the president without first securing the support of the military and the civil service, and without seizing the headquarters of the state broadcaster.

Tim Shipman

#14. I couldn't think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

Tony Horwitz

#15. If, after the election, you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and a Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I'd quit.

Hamilton Jordan

#16. Even if the Constitution of the United States had intended to recognize slavery, as a constitutional state institution, such intended recognition would have failed of effect, and been legally void, because slavery then had no constitutional existence to be recognized.

Lysander Spooner

#17. Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.

Mordecai Richler

#18. In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

Donna Tartt

#19. I went to Jersey City State College to please a family member. I wasn't prepared for school. To say I failed out is putting it nicely.

Derek Luke

#20. To you, the people of Flint, I say, as I have before, I am sorry and I will fix it. No citizen of this great state should endure this kind of catastrophe. Government failed you. Federal, state and local leaders by breaking the trust you placed in us.

Rick Snyder

#21. Aztecs had not only failed to repress the eating of enemy dead,
they were practicing a state-sponsored form of human sacrifice
and cannibalism on a scale never rivaled before or since.

Marvin Harris

#22. Direct popular government of a state larger than a city state had already failed therefore in Italy, because as yet there was no public education, no press, and no representative system; it had failed though these mere mechanical difficulties, before the first Punic War.

H.G.Wells

#23. Desire can't be sated, because if it is, the longing disappears and then we've failed, because desire is the state we seek.

Seth Godin

#24. Liberalism had come to mean spending more on everything-speech police, failed poverty programs that reward dependence, a bigger nanny state telling us we cannot eat fatty foods, workplace roles that stifle opportunity, and absurd environmental regulations.

John Stossel

#25. One of the central flaws in the state of contemporary music is that the major record companies have failed to incorporate that simple fact into their business plans. They've come into an industry that's based on idiosyncratic artists and tried to erase every idiosyncratic aspect out of it.

Moby

#26. Some remote fragment of Main Line to somewhere else, there was, which was going to ruin the Money Market if it failed, and Church and State if it succeeded, and (of course), the Constitution, whether or no;

Charles Dickens

#27. One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: 'They present solutions, but I don't like them.

Noam Chomsky

#28. The revolutionaries failed to institute the novel forms of social and political organization they hankered after; Workers would not accept a ten-day week, or state-appointed priests, or rectangular departements, or the cult of the Supreme Being.

Alan Ryan

#29. A lot of ideas get re-used and made part of new songs if the first version didn't cut the mustard, and the stuff that gets left off usually contained the germ of something good but failed to reach a satisfactory state by the recording stage.

Bent Saether

#30. I don't think anybody should do what they do in hopes of being successful. But I always expect myself to be successful at things. And if I'm not, I feel bad. I don't care for failure. I've failed at a number of things, and it's not my favorite state of mind. So I prefer success.

Michael Feldman

#31. Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?

Leo Tolstoy

#32. I can officially state that my government and myself believe that all over Europe we need to open a debate on the 'drug question' in order to create more coherent and human policies with better perspectives ... The policy of criminalizing consumers has failed, creating many problems to our society.

George Papandreou

#33. The Declaration of Independence says when government fails, the people have the right to replace it. Well, New York State government has failed and the people have the right, indeed the people have the the people have the obligation, to act.

Andrew Cuomo