Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes

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.

For government consists in nothing else but so controlling subjects that they shall neither be able to, nor have cause to do [it] harm.

A government that understands the limits of power as well as its potential.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

I don't like the idea that the government has so much of a say in things.

Government is force.

The more powerful the state, the more important it submit to widely held norms and consensual methods.

There is no force greater than the state force.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

Well, I think, by definition, all power has limits.

Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever.

Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the State has wielded through the centuries. Once excellent weapon has been tradition. The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon; for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it.

Government is a necessary evil

Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us

What evidence do we have that states are incapable of further exercising an authority they have exercised successfully for over 200 years?

The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school.

What is this thing we call government? Is it anything but organized violence? The law orders you to obey, and if you don't obey, it will compel you by force - all governments, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or fear of punishment.

The state is the only institution entitled to apply coercion and compulsion and to inflict harm upon individuals. This tremendous power cannot be abandoned to the discretion of some men, however competent and clever they may deem themselves. It is necessary to restrict its application. This is the task of the laws.

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

Every government, every country, has the right to exercise force when necessary.

Government is the greatest combination for forces known to human society. It can command more men and raise more money than any and all other agencies combined.

When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another.

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.