Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself. He is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State.
statequotes
Words like society and state are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the state, far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the state is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities.
The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.
atomization / isolation / relationship / state / understanding
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
The state demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice of its citizens, but at the same time, it treats them as children through an excess of secrecy, and a censorship of news and expression of opinion, which render the minds of those who are, thus, intellectually repressed, defenseless against every unfavorable situation, and every wild rumor.
citizens / defenseless / demands / secrecy / state
There is only one state – admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological – in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.
citizen / monopolize / peace / state / War
Every state looks upon its neighbours as at bottom a horde of robbers, who will fall upon it as soon as they have the opportunity.
neighbours / opportunity / robbers / state
The Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which is therefore likely to lead to a dictatorship.
dictatorship / rule / society / state / Utopian
Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.