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Randolph Bourne Quotes
1886–1918 United States
Randolph Silliman Bourne (30 May 1886–22 December 1918) was a progressive writer and leftist intellectual born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially his unfinished work The State, discovered after his death.
United States Anarchists Essayists Also known as: Randolph Silliman Bourne
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We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State.
The State (1918)
War is the health of the State and it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution.
The State (1918)
Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress—one might say, the only lever of progress.
Youth (1912)
Indeed, it is not too much to say that the normal relation of States is war.
The State (1918)
How shall I describe Youth, the time of contradictions and anomalies? The fiercest radicalisms, the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible gayety, bitter melancholy,—all these moods are equally part of that showery spring-time of life.
Youth (1912)
War is the health of the State.
The State (1918)
Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten.
The State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade everyone and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-feeling.
The State (1918)
War is the health of the State. Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover.
The State (1918)
The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected has proved to be of far less significance in the course of political evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king. … Kings have often been selected this way in European history, and the Roman Emperor was regularly chosen by election.
The State (1918)
In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.
Youth (1912)
The American Revolution began with certain latent hopes that it might turn into a genuine break with the State ideal. The Declaration of Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not only with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but also with the Divine Right of the State. … If revolution is justifiable a State may even be criminal sometimes in resisting its own extinction.
The State (1918)
The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations.
The State (1918)
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