Paul Valery Quotes

If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish. If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.

… every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against himself, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will.

While the state can coerce, with some exceptions (like North Korea) it seems to me misleading to think of it as capable of "enslavement."

If you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness - which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe - its criminality may be safely got on with.

Autonomous state actions will regularly take forms that attempt to reinforce the authority, political longevity, and social control of the state.

You can have a strong government and a weak people, or strong people and weak government, but you cannot have both.

Democratic nation states remain far more capable of managing the circuit of coercion, taxation and legitimation than any transnational bodies.

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.

Government power, juxtaposed to private power, is a balance.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Government is force.

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.

There is no force greater than the state force.

There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive.

There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.

Where the Government is weak, military sway prevails.

... we have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation.... On the other hand ... by virtue of our natural impulse, we must ever watch against the danger which lurks for our personal liberty in the power of the state.

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

Fascism accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with the state's.

You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.

I have seen the rise of fascism and communism. Both philosophies glorify the arbitrary power of the state... But both theories fail. Both deny those God-given liberties that are the inalienable right of each person on this planet, indeed, they deny the existence of God.

Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards.