Modern State Quotes

#1. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

Friedrich Engels

#2. The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.

Kenzaburo Oe

#3. Our country, like every modern state, needs profound democratic reforms. It needs political and ideological pluralism, a mixed economy and protection of human rights and the opening up of society.

Andrei Sakharov

#4. A modern state is such a complex and interdependent fabric that it offers a target highly sensitive to a sudden and overwhelming blow from the air.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#5. In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.

Jill Lepore

#6. The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

J.M. Coetzee

#7. The modern State's greatest single instrument of oppression, its murderous tax on drink ... accounts for nearly all the miseries besetting our once-merry land; football hooliganism, colour prejudice, industrial unrest, cynicism about politicians; the list is endless.

Auberon Waugh

#8. The modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.

G.K. Chesterton

#9. A basic principal of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.

Noam Chomsky

#10. These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.

Robert Gilpin

#11. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

James C. Scott

#12. Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.

Richard Engel

#13. The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Georges Bernanos

#14. The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.

Anthony Burgess

#15. My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut.

Paddy Ashdown

#16. When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary.

Timothy Snyder

#17. We have witnessed in the 20th century a tremendous phenomenon: the birth of the modern State of Israel. ...God is at work with His ancient chosen earthly people. We ought to pay attention to what is going on for behind the movement of nations is the hand of God.

Dr. J. Otis Yoder

#18. This is where each individual must decide for himself. The essential thing is the decision to challenge the modern state, which without this small group of protesters will be checked by neither brake, value, nor reason.

Jacques Ellul

#19. The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.

Richard M. Weaver

#20. In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13)

Joseph Reese Strayer

#21. Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.

Kenneth Rexroth

#22. I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.

Herbert Read

#23. Hamas was born to destroy. Hamas does not know how to build. I doubt they will be able to build a modern Palestinian state and hope their lies will be exposed to the Palestinian public.

Mosab Hassan Yousef

#24. Modern society, the political body, the legal and judiciary system, the state of governance, capitalism and the very fabric of the society itself, including our religions and so-called morals and values, are institutions steeped in traditions of absolute and total violence.

Bryant McGill

#25. It is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public.

Oscar Wilde

#26. the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state. The

Marc Reisner

#27. Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

J.G. Ballard

#28. All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Albert Camus

#29. Pray state, this day, on one side of a sheet of paper, how the Royal navy is being adapted to meet the conditions of modern warfare.

Michael Paterson

#30. To be modern is not a fashion, it is a state. It is necessary to understand history, and he who understands history knows how to find continuity between that which was, that which is, and that which will be.

Le Corbusier

#31. And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. The Prince, XVIII, 5

Niccolo Machiavelli

#32. The modern secular state's capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted, not

David Bentley Hart

#33. Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule.

Rick Perlstein

#34. This 'archaic' stage of Sumerian script is not wholly understood by modern scholarship; and Sumerology is a tightly-knit, somewhat secretive academic discipline, which does not make it easy for the outsider to form a clear view of the current state of knowledge in the field.

Geoffrey Sampson

#35. The Internet is a modern infrastructure that plays a key role in the future of the state.

Thomas De Maiziere

#36. To exploit is to take undue advantage of someone else's need, whether that be unfair wages paid or unfair prices charged. I have just summed up the current state of modern capitalism in one sentence.

Robert Peate

#37. Every fascist state like Germany, France, or modern Poland takes away citizen's right to self-defense. Fascist Americans such as Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton want to take arms away from American society.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke

#38. Modern techniques have torn down state frontiers, both economical and intellectual. The growth of means of transport has created a world market and an opportunity for division of labor embracing all the developed and most of the undeveloped states.

Christian Lous Lange

#39. The modern concept of separation is an argument for a total separation of religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of the doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil government.

Francis Schaeffer

#40. A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

David Foster Wallace

#41. The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring as Sappho says, More real than real, more gold than gold.

Kenneth Rexroth

#42. roughly identical with modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. It has an area of approximately 10,000 square miles, somewhat larger than the state of Massachusetts. Its climate is extremely hot and dry, and

Samuel Noah Kramer

#43. In our modern world of interdependent nations, hardly any state can wage war successfully without raising loans and buying war materials of every kind in the markets of other nations.

Arthur Henderson

#44. Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.

Karen Armstrong

#45. Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it "ambivalence": a collision between thought and feeling.

David Seabury

#46. It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue.

George Eliot

#47. There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Jerry Falwell

#48. So here we are, just two months away from the election, with more and more examples that modern day Jim Crowe laws are alive and well in the state of Florida.

Corrine Brown

#49. We aren't born with the innate knowledge of how to "do" relationship. Even worse, we've been brainwashed by modern day society to look for and seek perfection, which leads to an ongoing state of frustration and dissatisfaction.

Arielle Ford

#50. It was a superb agreement to end a war, but a very bad agreement to make a state. From now on, we have to part company with Dayton and try to build a modern democratic state, for which I have tried to lay the foundations.

Paddy Ashdown

#51. One of the frustrations about the modern world is that we don't even have a good vocabulary to describe our state. The word sentiment sounds mushy [but] sentiment is not mushy.

David Brooks

#52. The bad preacher takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out into the traditional language of Christianity. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear modern dress.

C.S. Lewis

#53. In Egypt, a civil state means a modern nationalist state that is compatible with Islamist provisions.

Ali Gomaa

#54. Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

Richard Dawkins

#55. This modern mania for interfering in other's lives, usually under the guise of health and safety concerns, is highly irritating and counterproductive. Down with the nanny state.

Felix Dennis

#56. The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Chris Hedges

#57. Egypt now is a real civil state. It is not theocratic, it is not military. It is democratic, free, constitutional, lawful and modern.

Mohammed Morsi

#58. The parallel existence and mutual interaction of "state" and "market" in the modern world create "political economy"; without both state and market there could be no political economy.

Robert Gilpin

#59. We're living in a state where no one can trust his telephone conversations, nor even his personal conversations in a room, in a bar or anywhere else.

Walter Cronkite

#60. Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system

Giorgio Agamben

#61. As liberals, men like Richter viewed socialism as the great modern counter-revolution, and believed that the achievement of the socialist goal would lead both to appalling poverty and state absolutism. There was nothing in the socialist doctrine of the time that would suggest otherwise.

Ralph Raico

#62. Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society.

Samuel P. Huntington

#63. Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

Umberto Eco

#64. But the Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state.

H.G.Wells

#65. A combination of fine tea, enchanting objects and soothing surroundings exerts a therapeutic effect by washing away the corrosive strains and stress of modern life. [ ... It] induces a modd that is spiritually refreshing [and produces] a genial state of mind.

John Blofeld

#66. The natural condition of the modern conservative movement is to always be in a state of revolution. Conservatives are, by definition, uncomfortable with power.

Craig Shirley

#67. Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

Michael Johns

#68. Modern ecumenism rightly began in mission, but then lapsed into a merger mentality, then defensive bureaucracy, and finally into unrepresentative forms of extreme politicization.

Thomas C. Oden

#69. The 'Islamic State', that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state.

Abdal Hakim Murad

#70. Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#71. We must recognize the chief characteristic of the modern era - a permanent state of what I call violent peace.

James D. Watkins

#72. Most Modern Orthodox are religious Zionists. Despite all differences and nuances among us, we consider the founding of the State a historic change. We accept it as something that came from Providence.

Norman Lamm

#73. The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages.

Alexandre Dumas

#74. After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.

Lion Feuchtwanger

#75. On a more everyday level, our point is simply that when a person feels himself inwardly empty, as is the case with so many modern people, he experiences nature around him also as empty, dried up, dead. The two experiences of emptiness are two sides of the same state of impoverished relation to life.

Rollo May

#76. States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

Steven Pinker

#77. The nation state is a relatively modern idea, and I don't think we're getting a lot out of it except for flags and World Cups.

Russell Brand

#78. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times a thought can be refuted, yes, but not retracted. (p. 179)

Milan Kundera

#79. Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.

Jeanette Winterson

#80. 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

#81. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

#82. But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims." A true allegory of the state of one's mind in a representative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.

Matthew Arnold

#83. Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.

Camille Paglia

#84. Successful economies in the modern world are not sheepish about the power and responsibility of the state.

David Miliband

#85. The Eskimos have thirty words for describing different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the same number of expressions to describe giving a bribe to a state official.

Victor Pelevin

#86. Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.

Gregory Benford

#87. Heresy no longer existed within religion; it
was founded in the state.

Reinhart Koselleck

#88. I ask especially that no state shall, by law or otherwise, authorize the return of the saloon, either in its old form or in some modern guise.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#89. Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms ...

Simone Weil

#90. Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.

Thomas Sowell

#91. Unless we abandon elements which resemble a police state, we can't meet the demands of being a modern society.

Ahmet Necdet Sezner

#92. Modern Orthodoxy has a highly positive attitude toward the State of Israel. Our Ultra-Orthodox brethren recognize only the Holy Land, but not the state.

Norman Lamm

#93. The ethical life ... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society ... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.

Roger Scruton

#94. Full employment is a socially hazardous goal. In effect, it aspires to restore through political expedients the pre-industrial state of toil that science, engineering, technology and modern management are pledged to overcome.

Louis O. Kelso

#95. One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.

Karen Armstrong

#96. [The Soviets] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth; they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Ronald Reagan