Leviathan Quotes

Our federal government, which was intended to operate as a very limited constitutional republic, has instead become a virtually socialist leviathan that redistributes trillions of dollars. We can hardly be surprised when countless special interests fight for the money. The only true solution to the campaign money problem is a return to a proper constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand. (Ron Paul)
The greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure - roads, bridges, schools, Internet - off which we all thrive. Absurd. We don't credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein's manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. View quote
Charles Krauthammer
The Book of Job is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of nature. Leviathan is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of the state. View quote
Donald Phillip Verene
It is the moral factor which decides the fate of nations: man's spirit can prove greater than the power of leviathan. A nation is swiftly overcome if its spirit is weak; but with unyielding determination it can vanquish powers that appear to be utterly invincible. View quote
Gwynfor Evans
Will sensed a stir in Jim's house; Jim, too, with his fine dark antennae, must have felt the waters part high over town to let a Leviathan pass. View quote
Ray Bradbury
Leviathan learning to overcome time. View quote
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Leviathan is not the biggest fish; - I have heard of Krakens. View quote
Herman Melville
Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, [Kierkegaard] pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or the clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
Leviathan was like the Wizard of Oz, an illusion built from the calculations and imagination of those beholding it. But if there was not much behind the curtain, it did not really matter. For whatever was there, the beholder of the illusion could be certain that the sovereign possessed more power than he wielded himself. View quote
Corey Robin
Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"-"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen. View quote
Marvin Harris
An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation. (André Malraux)
It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation. View quote
André Malraux
Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented. View quote
Steven Pinker
This is the Generation of that LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently)of that Mortall God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence. View quote
Thomas Hobbes
The Republic of Mhari contains five thousand times more cells than there are humans on earth, but is somehow both more and less than the sum of her parts. If all those cells die, then I am, by definition, dead. But the relationship between cell-citizens and the Republic of Me is less obvious than you might think. At any point in time some of my cells are dying and being replaced, and the me that exist today consists almost entirely of different cells from the me of a couple of years ago-although I'm still me. But if you were to separate all my cells and then keep them alive in a mad scientist's test-tube collection, I'd be dead, though all my bits live on. The Republic of Self can be dissolved, or taken over in a coup, or drastically reformed. I harbor this illusion of unitary identity-but in reality I'm what biologists call a superorganism, a swarm, and ensemble entity. I am not me: I am Hobbes's Leviathan, or Leviathan's Representative. View quote
Charles Stross