Character Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

— Noam Chomsky

A state is not a state if it belongs to one man.

— Sophocles

The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving…

— Gustav Landauer

The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of…

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving…

— Gustav Landauer

The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace...but merely a vehicle of power for the…

— Niccolo Machiavelli

A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange.…

— Aristotle

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

— Walter Lippmann

Man is not made for the State but the State for man and it derives its just powers only from the consent of the…

— Thomas Jefferson

There is no class of people so hard to manage in a state, as those whose intentions are honest, but whose consciences are bewitched.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

States in the world are like individuals in the state of nature. They are neither perfectly good nor are they controlled by law.

— Kenneth Waltz

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

— Plato