State - christiansquoting.org.uk

The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else. -- Frederic Bastiat

Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice. --Linda Bowles, "The Weaning Process, " Washington Times, December 20, 1994, p. A16.

We have entered an Orwellian era in which entitlement replaces responsibility, coercion is described as compassion, compulsory redistribution is called sharing, race quotas substitute for diversity, and suicide is prescribed as 'death with dignity.' Political discourse has become completely corrupted. The reason is that if you tell people directly that you want to raise their taxes, transfer their wealth, count them by skin color, or let doctors kill them, most will object. Statists know this and therefore are obliged to obfuscate. -- Theodore Forstmann

The state is the servant of the citizen, and not his master--John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) _State of the Union Address_ [January 11, 1962]

… we have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation.… On the other hand … by virtue of our natural impulse, we must ever watch against the danger which lurks for our personal liberty in the power of the state. - Abraham Kuyper (1837&endash;1920)

It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. --Henry L. Mencken (1926) quoted in Nock's _Our Enemey the State_

It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs. --H. L. Mencken _The American Mercury_ p.507

Thus the State turns every contingency into a resource for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted &endash; or as I believe our American glossary now has it, 'conditioned' - to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good." --Albert J. Nock, _Our Enemy the State_ (1935)

If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed. --Michael Parenti _Inventing Reality_ (1986)

The politics of God requires us to reject the politics of man, which sees State intervention as the answer to society's problems.the politics of God, the true politics, requires us to adhere to God's social order, a social order in which Church and family have roles that are equally as important as that of the State and which may not be usurped by the State.In this sense Christianity as a political religion is all-embracing - i.e. it embraces all of life. -Stephen Perks ,'Christianity As A Political Faith' 'Christianity & Society', April 2004

Of course it is not the duty of the State to proclaim the Christian faith and compel people to believe the truth.The calling of the State is to administer public justice.what constitutes the public justice that the State is called to uphold must be defined by the word of God as this has been given to us in the Christian Scriptures, and it is the duty of the State to uphold the law of God as it relates to the political sphere even where those guilty of acts defined as criminal offences by God's word believe this to be a violation of their religious and civil liberties (cf 1 Tim. 1:8-11). In such cases no one is persecuted for their 'beliefs'; rather, they are punished for their 'crimes'.But what constitutes the crime that the State must suppress must be defined by the word of God, and therefore the State must look to God's law to guide it in its calling as the servant of God. Stephen Perks ,'Christianity As A Political Faith' 'Christianity & Society', April 2004

A state can no more give up part of her sovereignty than a lady can give up part of her virtue.--John Randolph (attrib.)

It is worth noting that the people today who so vehemently wish to sweep religion from all public spaces and institutions are also the same people who consistently oppose freedom. They want only one God &emdash; the state, which of course they intend to run. --Charley Reese, "Jefferson Speaks", Friday, November 29, 2002

To have the state as servant and not as master - Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power,p372