State Function Quotes

The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.

Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a "taxing machine," to the contented a "machine for securing property.

Government is a progressive instrument for the common good.

Government is merely a means to an end.

Government can contribute to a shared sense of purpose on the part of the citizenry; that's its highest and best application.

The debate on how to shrink the federal government is at the core of our problem of government not doing its job.

But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.

The State is made for Mankind, not mankind for the state

What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms. We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, 'What can the state do that is good?'

That’s the function of government—to do for people what they cannot do for themselves.

Militarism is basically a way of thinking, a certain interpretation of the function of the state; this manner of thinking is, moreover, revealed by its outer forms: by armaments and state organization.

Government is not a warfare of interests.

The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.

The primary role of government is to provide for the safety and security of their populations.

So government acts as a safeguard of our property.

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

The nation had come into existence, historically, as a device for protecting the lives, the institutions, and the property of its people, at least in those states in which property existed. And the function of the state had been just that, which is to provide a means of protecting the group, an extension of the tribal philosophy. But with atomic weapons, no nation was able any longer to perform its historic function. And yet we persisted in thinking that it did. The form existed but the ability to fulfill that particular function was annihilated along with the city of Hiroshima.

…it is the peculiar function of the state and the city to guarantee every man the free and undisturbed control of his own particular property.

The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but it remains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised.

Defence was an afterthought, prompted by necessity; and its introduction as a State function, though effected doubtless with a view to the strengthening of the State, was really and in principle the initiation of the State's destruction.

I argue that one of the functions of a capitalist state is to defend capitalism from itself, to defend capitalism from the capitalists.

The State becomes society or humanity on the ethical side, a production and trade system on the economic side.

Government … becomes the rational art of minimizing the inevitable conflicts of primal irrational wills against one another and against the forces of nature at large

Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution.