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An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.

The state is in danger of falling into disrepute due to the evidence of its inadequate resources.

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

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

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

States seem to have a natural life cycle, and anything can occur to change them into something else, and that something might be no bad thing.

The danger in our system is that the general government, which represents the interests of the whole, may encroach on the states, which represent the peculiar and local interests, or that the latter may encroach on the former.

Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It's remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months.