Wilhelm von Humboldt Quotes

The state considers that its purpose is to enlighten, to develop, to enlarge, to strengthen, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people.

The state is a means to an end. Its end lies in the preservation and advancement of a community of physically and psychically homogenous creatures.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

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

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.

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.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

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

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.

When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.

All culture developed as some wild, raw creature strived to live better and longer.

Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.

A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization.

In the small group then is where we shall find the inner meaning of democracy, its very heart and core.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

Justice is a faculty that may be developed. This development is what constitutes the education of the human race.

Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.

Many an individual has turned from the mean, personal, acquisitive point of view to one that sees society as a whole and works for its benefit. If there has been such a change in one person, there can be the same change in many.