Giuseppe Mazzini Quotes

Consequently, if the republic is the weal of the people, and there is no people if it be not associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and if there is no right where there is no justice, then most certainly it follows that there is no republic where there is no justice.

Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.

Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.

You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.

I mean, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the Black Lives Movement, it's very difficult to, in a sense, especially since the 1980s, to talk about what the social contract is and what it means, and what it means to celebrate public goods, what it means to make, create social investments.

Real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions.

The concept of government of, by, and for the people isn't just a platitude. It's the moral construction of our nation. It's in our bones.

Courage is the lifeblood of democracy.

I would like to have insights into things like government, all those big ideas that you brought up that I simply don't have ideas about. I would like to be able to since so many people discuss them, but I don't want to work at them. I don't think my ambition is that strong in that direction.

The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all.

Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.

Menaced by collectivist trends, we must seek revival of our strength in the spiritual foundations which are the bedrock of our republic. Democracy is the outgrowth of the religious conviction of the sacredness of every human life. On the religious side, its highest embodiment is the Bible; on the political side, the Constitution.

The human heart is the first home of democracy.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go. Science is all metaphor. In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show. If you don't like what you are doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.

Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom.

In a government bottomed on the will of all, the... liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all.

Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate -- something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force.

As the acceptance of democracy brings a certain life-giving power, so it has its own sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most obvious one is the curious sense which comes to us from time to time, that we belong to the whole, that a certain basic well being can never be taken away from us whatever the turn of fortune.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

I'm by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier.

We also need to find a language capable of defending government as an element of the common good, one that does not define itself as both a punishing and corporate state. This is not merely a matter of redefining sovereignty, but also rethinking what is distinctive about the social state, social responsibility, and the common good.

Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.

In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.