Vandana Shiva Quotes

The basic principle that governs the relation between a state and its people --a total and unconditional subordination and submission of individuals and classes to the state…

The state was made for man, not man for state.

I stand today on this floor to appeal for protection from the strong arm of the government for her loyal children, irrespective of color and race, who are citizens of the southern states, and particularly of the State of Georgia.

Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.

More than half the world's largest 100 economies are corporations. They have no loyalties to place or citizens.

A state of war is not a blank check... when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.

An owner’s right to exclude others from his property is the means by which he can avoid “bads” from happening: events that will lower the value of his property. By means of an unceasing flood of redistributive legislation, the democratic state has worked relentlessly not only to strip its citizens of all arms (weapons) but also to strip domestic property owners of their right of exclusion, thereby robbing them of much of their personal and physical protection.

The country is the people.

The right to speak freely concerning functions of the Federal Government is a privilege of immunity of every citizen of the United States which, even before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, a State was powerless to curtail.

States are … instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice versa.

A man's mere property status, without more, cannot be used by a state to test, qualify or limit his rights as a citizen of the United States.

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations …. A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit.... A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states.

The state is there to respect the freedom of each citizen to believe in what he or she wants to believe in.

In the East [Russia] the state was everything. Civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the West there was a proper relationship between the state and civil society.

While we don't have the authority on the state level to change federal policy, my fellow governors and I do have a duty to protect our states' citizens, and we have a personal responsibility to act when we have the power to do so.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

I'm always theoretically opposed to capital punishment as a matter of policy; like, I don't believe a state should put its citizens to death.

In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.

The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens.

Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable.

The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of right.

An individual citizen cannot protect himself from the powers of large corporations or external governments. It is the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens.

The bigger the State, the smaller the citizen

In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave.

The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.