Sam Harris Quotes

To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.

One must be stark mad, to believe that mankind can subsist without magistrates.

The modern civilized State has been developed by the antagonism between individual and social interests, which has transformed primitive Society into Civilization.

I do not find a model in the world, that time, place, and some singular emergences have not necessarily altered; nor is it easy to frame a civil government, that shall serve all places alike.

The first and most important component in nation building is LAW. Law is the source of national Cohesion.

Civilizations evolve over time, and most scholars of civilization, including people like Carol Quigley, argue that they go through periods of warring states, and eventually evolve into a universal state.

A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

Few consider how much we are indebted to government, because few can represent how wretched mankind would be without it.

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.

It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization-is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.

Civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.

It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government.

If the Egyptian people can create a democracy in the heart of the Arab world, it will be a more significant contribution to civilization than the great pyramids.

From the dim morning hours of history when the father was king and priest down to this modern time of history's high noon when nations stand forth full grown and self-governed, the law of coherence and continuity in political development has suffered no serious breach.

When the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name - a constitution.

A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.

What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?

With any new civilization... they have to have their own officers and police and governments and all that.

The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

The word "politics" comes from the Greek politeia which had to do with the citizenry, not the government.