A Quote by Baruch Spinoza

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Baruch Spinoza

Quote Topics

Bad Cannot Civil Common Conceived Consent Good Natural Natural State Only Sin State

Quote Author

Baruch Spinoza
Dutch - Philosopher
November 24, 1632 - February 21, 1677

My theory is that humans aren't really bad; we all do bad things, but being bad is not our natural state. You're acting out of fear, lack of understanding, compassion, but essentially communication. Human beings are made of love, an overwhelming desire to love. When we communicate, we exist in our natural state.

Seal

If the state cannot be entirely composed of good men, and yet each citizen is expected to do his own business well, and must therefore have virtue, still inasmuch as all the citizens cannot be alike, the virtue of the citizen and of the good man cannot coincide. All must have the virtue of the good citizen - thus, and thus only, can the state be perfect; but they will not have the virtue of a good man, unless we assume that in the good state all the citizens must be good.

Aristotle

Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.

Benito Mussolini

Everything is in constant flux, from state to state, from good to bad and back again... only in transmutation, perpetual motion, lies truth.

Asger Jorn

In fact all the Islamists, that is the reformists not the Salafis, now they all say that they want a civil state, a civil state with Islamic reference points. They are not talking about an Islamic state, or sharia in the way this was once understood in the fight against the colonisers, or just afterwards in the 70's, 80's and 90's.

Tariq Ramadan

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Gore Vidal

I think it's alright if the government wants to say, in the state of Massachusetts, in the state of New York, in the state of California, that civil ceremonies should be accepted, I think that should be fine. I don't think that even those states that believe in civil marriages between homosexuals or ordained in a church should perform civil ceremonies.

Jimmy Carter

My natural state is one that's affected by the shortage of dopamine production in my brain. So my natural state is to be halting and at times tremulous and kind of just physically disturbed. I mean, that's my natural state, given the situation in my brain. But I'm always as happy either way. And so when it comes to me, body language lies.

Michael J. Fox

Man is not made for the State but the State for man and it derives its just powers only from the consent of the governed.

Thomas Jefferson

The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state. It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The day when the Jew was first admitted to civil rights, the Christian state was in danger...the entrance of the Jew into {White) society marked the destruction of the State, meaning by State, the Christian State.

Bernard Lazare

We also need to find a language capable of defending government as an element of the common good, one that does not define itself as both a punishing and corporate state. This is not merely a matter of redefining sovereignty, but also rethinking what is distinctive about the social state, social responsibility, and the common good.

Henry Giroux

We are living in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is only his as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and his possessions at the call of the state.