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If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.
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p. 62

 

John Lancaster Spalding

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We have rebelled against all controls and religions, all laws and judgments which the mighty sought to foist upon us. We kept to our dedication and our missions. By these will the State be judged, by the moral character it imparts to its citizens, by the human values determining its inner and outward relations, and by its fidelity, in thought and act, to the supreme behest: "and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Here is crystallized the eternal law of Judaism, and all the written ethics in the world can say no more. The State will be worthy of its name only if its systems, social and economic, political and legal, are based upon these imperishable words. They are more than a formal precept which can be construed as passive or negative: not to deprive, not to rob, not to oppress, not to hurt.

 

David Ben-Gurion

 

Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival.

 

Hans Morgenthau

 

The same dark spirit of domination has led them to — for the first time in American history — imprison American citizens with no charges, no right to see a lawyer, no right to notify their family, no right to know of what they are accused, and no right to gain access to any court to present an appeal of any sort. The Bush Administration has even acquired the power to compel librarians to tell them what any American is reading, and to compel them to keep silent about the request — or else the librarians themselves can also be imprisoned.
They have launched an unprecedented assault on civil liberties, on the right of the courts to review their actions, on the right of the Congress to have information to how they are spending the public's money and the right of the news media to have information about the policies they are pursuing.

 

Al Gore

 

"The 'state' on the modern conception is a legally defined term which refers, at the level of substance, to a state power that possesses both internal and external sovereignty, at the spatial level over a clearly delimited terrain (the state territory) and at the social level over the totality of members (the body of citizens or the people). State power constitutes itself in the forms of positive law, and the people is the bearer of the legal order whose jurisdiction is restricted to the state territory. In political usage, the concepts 'nation' and 'people' have the same extension. But in addition to its legal definition, the term 'nation' has the connotation of a political community shaped by common descent, or at least by a common language, culture, and history. A people becomes a 'nation' in this historical sense only in the concrete form of a particular form of life.

 

Jurgen Habermas‎

 

You never get to the end of Christ's words. There is something in them always behind. They pass into proverbs — they pass into laws — they pass into doctrines — they pass into consolations; but they never pass away, and, after all the use that is made of them, they are still not exhausted.

 

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley