Abraham Lincoln Quotes

The Union is older than any of the States, and, in fact created them as States.

There is no nation on the earth that wants, for its security, to depend on anybody else.

This right to secede is deduced from the nature of the Constitution, which they say is a compact between sovereign States who have preserved their whole sovereignty, and therefore are subject to no superior; that because they made the compact, they can break it when in their opinion it has been departed from by the other States. Fallacious as this course of reasoning is, it enlists State pride, and finds advocates in the honest prejudices of those who have not studied the nature of our government sufficiently to see the radical error on which it rests.

We still give the nation state the monopoly on the legal use of violence in our own defense.

Until 1847 Switzerland remained a pure Confederation of States, that is to say, she took five and a half centuries to make the step which the United States achieved at once.

To give laws unto a people; to institute magistrates and officers over them; to punish and pardon malefactors; to have the sole authority of making war and peace, are the true marks of sovereignty.

State Creation: A growth Industry.

Canada is not another [American] State, and we don't want to be one.

It does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state ... it means the end of a thousand years of history.

Just as one wife does not have two husbands so one land does not have two sovereign nations in possession of it.

A Volk [people] without a state is nothing, a lifelong frivolous phantom like the vagabond gypsies and Jews.

The fact that we are smaller and weaker does not mean that we have less sovereignty than you.

They shall forever be a part of the United States.

They [Americans] were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created, people in the history of the world.

Borders most often result from wars or peace treaties that end wars.

The kingdom is not divisible. Regnum non est divisible.

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

I cannot but think that there are strong reasons for doubting the applicability of the epithet "state" to a people so low in the grade of organized society as our Indian tribes most generally

Nations are equal in respect to each other, and entitled to claim equal consideration for their rights, whatever may be their relative dimensions or strength, or however greatly they may differ in government, religion, or manners. This perfect equality, and entire independence of all distinct states, is a fundamental principle of public law. It is a necessary consequence of this equality that each nation has a right to govern itself as it may think proper, and no one nation is entitled to dictate a form of government or religion, or a course of internal policy, to another. No state is entitled to take cognizance or notice of the domestic administration of another state, or of what passes within it as between the government and its own subjects

Germany within its self is so Potent, that it might be formidable to all its Neighbours, if its strength was well united and rightly employed; nevertheless this strong Body has also its infirmities, which weaken its strength, and slacken its vigour; its irregular Constitution of Government is one of the chief causes of its Distemper.

The sovereignty of states is a fairly archaic notion. If the rulers abuse their power and the people, what do you do then. The must be an international duty to protect.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude unless for the punishment of crime shall ever be tolerated in this state

Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.

Laws form the most important portion of a nation's history.

The chief threats to security come from failed states.