State Weakness Quotes

Al Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan and Yemen … is facilitated less by the states’ weakness than by the ruling regime’s unwillingness to combat Islamic extremism—and indeed, their decision to embrace jihadi groups.

Outwardly, the Reich was weak, existing only on paper. Inwardly, the people was torn apart, bleeding from a thousand wounds. At home, strife dominated between parties, occupations, groups, classes, and religions. Our Führer Adolf Hitler saw that the Reich could survive and grow strong only if one achieved unity within the German people. That was the work of our party over the last fourteen years: to make once more one German people from a people of competing interests, from a people of differing religions, occupations, groups and classes.

Daesh thought it could exploit the vulnerability of the Iraqi state, but it underestimated the overwhelming desire of the Iraqi people for unity.

If you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness - which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe - its criminality may be safely got on with.

Experience has taught that a divided power in the state is impotent and at odds with itself.

Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.

In the end, I think, the state's rigidity is a function of its own insecurity, its indecisiveness.

The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.

… weak nation strategy

Increasingly, the state system has been eroding. Terrorists have exploited this weakness by burrowing into the state system in order to attack it.

Liberty is not wanting in popular (democratic) states; nay, they have rather too much of it, since it degenerates into licentiousness. Hence it is that they are ever tottering and weak. Intestine commotions, or foreign attacks, often throw them into consternation.

Israel needs to change direction, and this is not just political. We're becoming more closed-in, more isolated, more scared. Those who talk tough are making the State of Israel very weak, very isolated - very Jewish, in the Diaspora-sense, in that 'everyone is against us.' We need to get out of this.

The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by community organizer Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking. But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn't work.

To strengthen a weak government, we must reduce its power.

Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.