Isabel Paterson Quotes

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

The difference between the denominational system and the public school system is all the difference between bolstering them up on the one hand and letting them alone of the other.

Government has ever been careful to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more.

No country can ever flourish or make its mark as a nation, as long as the principle of (educational) compulsion is absent

… the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions…. Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. ... If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school?

Any nation wishing to promote national education could not expect to achieve its aims until it took it control of education in its own hands

It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.

Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interferes with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.

Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state.

The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience.

A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats.

Socialists cry “Power to the people”, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean - power over people, power to the State.

Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God's revelation.

Socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state.

Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.

We are living in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is only his as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and his possessions at the call of the state.

Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.

Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

All democracies demand common public education because nothing makes people so much alike as the same education.

Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into Tyranny. The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information.

In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery

What I experienced in Cuba, I have become a student of what, how communism operates.