“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”

“An armed society is a polite society.”

“But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.”

“When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.”

“Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

“By giving full expression to the contradiction between civil society and the state, the French Revolution radically transformed both its terms. To put it differently: dualism was not abolished but, rather, displaced within the space delimited by the two poles of the contradiction. This created a new split between 'man', a member of civil society, and the 'citizen', a member of the state. It is only by 'abstracting' from his condition as man and his insertion into the organization of civil society that the political subject can become a citizen and make his entry into the political community: it is only as a 'sheer, blank individual' who accepts the fact that the political is divorced from the social that he can take part in the life of the state, which is based on the freedom and equality of its citizens.(...)The political state is 'abstract' in the sense suggested by the etymology of the word; it appears as the residue or the 'precipitate' of the constitutive movement by means of which civil society transcends its own limits to attain political existence, while leaving its internal differences intact, or, rather, transforming them into mere 'differences of social life' 'without significance in political life'.The state is incapable of substantially affecting the contents of civil society, for it is, precisely, a product of civil society's abstraction from itself.”