Sovereignty Business Quotes

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In oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Men are enchained by reason of their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that their wives demand checks, it is because they alone engage in a business or profession that their wives require them to be successful, it is because they alone embody transcendence that their wives wish to rob them of it by taking charge...
Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
People everywhere, including the United States, are still prone to accept stereotypes, eager to believe what we want to believe (for example, on global warming) and anxious to await while others take the lead--seeking in vain to avoid both responsibility and risk. When trouble arises among faraway people, we remain tempted to hide behind the principle of national sovereignty, to "mind our own business" when it is convenient, and to think of democracy as a suit to be worn in fine weather but left in the closet when clouds threaten.
Madeleine K. Albright (Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948)
. . . we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. . . . We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say that everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, – it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and the Congress has not.” “The chief instrumentality by which the law of the Constitution has been extended to cover the facts of national development has of course been judicial interpretation, – the decisions of the courts. The process of formal amendment of the Constitution was made so difficult by provisions of the Constitution itself that it has seldom been feasible to use it; and the difficulty of formal amendment has undoubtedly made the courts more liberal, not to say lax, in their interpretation than they would otherwise have been. The whole business of adaptation has been theirs, and they have undertaken it with open minds, sometimes even with boldness and a touch of audacity...” “The old theory of the sovereignty of the States, which used so to engage our passions, has lost its vitality. The war between the States established at least this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers... We are impatient of state legislatures because they seem to us less representative of the thoughtful opinion of the country than Congress is. We know that our legislatures do not think alike, but we are not sure that our people do not think alike...
Woodrow Wilson (Constitutional Government in the United States (Library of Liberal Thought))
When trouble arise among faraway people, we remain tempted to hide behind the principle of national sovereignty, to "mind our own business" when it is convenient, and to think of democracy as a suit to be worn in fine weather but felt in the closet when clouds threaten.
Madeleine K. Albright (Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948)
Settlers in isolated regions of the countryside had risen up against the unpopular whiskey tax Washington had implemented three years earlier in 1791. Since then, the insurrection had swelled into a debate over the nation’s soul. The question of how to best tax whiskey would partially determine how to organize a loose collection of isolated areas into a nation. Would big business or small be the guiding force? The rebellion threatened the young nation’s sovereignty, and because Washington had speculatively invested in frontier property, it also threatened his personal fortune.
Reid Mitenbuler (Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey)
We should not be held back by the thought that if they are not elect, they will not believe us and our efforts to convert them will fail. That is true; but it is none of our business and should make no difference to our action. In the first place, it is always wrong to abstain from doing good for fear that it might not be appreciated. In the second place, the nonelect in this world are faceless men as far as w are concerned. We know that they exist, but we do not and cannot know who they are, and it is as futile as it is impious for us to try and guess. The identity of the reprobate is one of God's 'secret things' into which his people may not pry. In the third place, our calling as Christians is not to love God's elect, and them only, but to love our neighbour, irrespective of whether he is elect or not.
J.I. Packer (Evangelism & the Sovereignty of God)
Slavery became a huge, international business, and of course would remain one down to the present moment. It’s estimated that at the midpoint of the fifth century every third or fourth person in Athens was a slave. When Carthage fell to Rome in 146 B.C.E., fifty thousand of the survivors were sold as slaves. In 132 B.C.E. some seventy thousand Roman slaves rebelled; when the revolt was put down, twenty thousand were crucified, but this was far from the end of Rome’s problems with its slaves.               But new signs of distress appeared in this period that were far more relevant to our purpose here tonight. For the first time in history, people were beginning to suspect that something fundamentally wrong was going on here. For the first time in history, people were beginning to feel empty, were beginning to feel that their lives were not amounting to enough, were beginning to wonder if this is all there is to life, were beginning to hanker after something vaguely more. For the first time in history, people began listening to religious teachers who promised them salvation.               It's impossible to overstate the novelty of this idea of salvation. Religion had been around in our culture for thousands of years, of course, but it had never been about salvation as we understand it or as the people of this period began to understand it. Earlier gods had been talismanic gods of kitchen and crop, mining and mist, house-painting and herding, stroked at need like lucky charms, and earlier religions had been state religions, part of the apparatus of sovereignty and governance (as is apparent from their temples, built for royal ceremonies, not for popular public devotions).               Judaism, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Buddhism all came into being during this period and had no existence before it. Quite suddenly, after six thousand years of totalitarian agriculture and civilization building, the people of our culture—East and West, twins of a single birth—were beginning to wonder if their lives made sense, were beginning to perceive a void in themselves that economic success and civil esteem could not fill, were beginning to imagine that something was profoundly, even innately, wrong with them.
Daniel Quinn (The Teachings: That Came Before & After Ishmael)
The study of African coastal communities such as Ouidah also has a relevance for the currently fashionable project of ‘Atlantic history’, i.e. the attempt to treat the Atlantic as a historical unit, stressing interactions among the various states and communities that participated in the construction and operation of the trans-Atlantic trading system.18 Although proponents of Atlantic history have tended to concentrate on links between Europe and the Americas, it needs to be recognized that African societies were also active participants in the making of the Atlantic world.19 If there was an ‘Atlantic community’, the African coastal towns which served as embarkation points for the trans-Atlantic slave trade were part of it, their commercial and ruling elites being involved in political, social and cultural networks, as well as purely business linkages, which spanned the ocean.20 The study of such African towns, moreover, adds an important comparative dimension to our understanding of the growth and functioning of port cities in the Atlantic world in the era of the slave trade, since previous studies of Atlantic port towns in this period have concentrated on ports in the Americas.21 But such American ports were European colonial creations, which functioned as enclaves or centres of European power, a model that is not applicable to Atlantic ports in Africa, which remained under indigenous sovereignty (apart from the exceptional case of Luanda in Angola, which uniquely had already become a Portuguese colony in the sixteenth century).
Robin Law (Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 (Western African Studies))
[M]osques in Mughal India, though religiously potent, were considered detached from both sovereign terrain and dynastic authority, and hence politically inactive. As such, their desecration would have no relevance to the business of disestablishing a regime that had patronised them. Not surprisingly, then, when Hindu rulers established their authority over the territories of defeated Muslim rulers, they did not as a rule desecrate mosques or shrines, as, for example, when Shivaji established a Maratha kingdom on the ashes of Bijapur's former dominions of Maharashtra, or when Vijayanagara annexed the former territories of the Bahmanis or their successors. In fact, the rajas of Vijayanagra, as is well known, built their own mosques, evidently to accommodate the sizeable number of Muslims employed in their armed forces. By contrast, monumental royal temple complexes of the early medieval period were considered politically active, in as much as the state-deities they housed were understood as expressing the shared sovereignty of king and deity over a particular dynastic realm. Therefore, when Indo-Muslim commanders or rulers looted the consecrated images of defeated opponents and carried them off to their own capitals as war trophies, they were in a sense conforming to customary rules of Indian politics. Similarly, when they destroyed a royal temple or converted it into a mosque, the ruling authorities were building on a political logic that, they knew, placed supreme political significance on such temples. That same significance, in turn, rendered temples just as deserving of peace-time protection as it rendered them vulnerable in times of conflict.
Richard M. Eaton (Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India)
We are now quickly approaching the time when the Luciferian elite are planning to bring online a global government, cashless society, and universal religion. To do this, they have said repeatedly that they need to create a borderless world and get rid of independent, sovereign nation-states. “The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions,” wrote George Soros, a Hungarian American business magnate who is one of the richest people in the world and a supporter of progressive social causes. “We need some global system of political decision-making. In short, we need a global society to support our global economy.”26
Paul McGuire (Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon (Babylon Code))
Globalization is peaking, with a sharp backlash toward greater sovereignty and protectionism, exactly like the 1930s. But every cycle has its expansionary phase and then its consolidation and deleveraging phases. This is the peak of the dramatic growth of Western and developed countries and will lead to the continued rise of emerging and Asian countries. That’s why we see more volatility and civil unrest in those areas. We need to buckle our seat belts now to prepare for not only a great debt and financial-bubble deleveraging and deflationary period in the next several years, but also a time of true revolution in everything. I’m talking everything from political and social structures to business organizations reshaping and re-forming for many years, and even decades to come, just like after the Civil War. I’m talking the bottom-up network revolution in everything! It’s time to hunker down in your business and household finances. Cash out of the bubble in all risk assets for just a few years, even if you get out a bit too early. Crashes happen much faster than the bubbles build, so don’t wait for the horse to bolt before closing the barn door. Consider where you should be living and target less bubbly areas that are safer and more aligned with your political and social values.
Harry S. Dent (Zero Hour: Turn the Greatest Political and Financial Upheaval in Modern History to Your Advantage)
these economic demands—for basic public services that work, for decent housing, for land redistribution—represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty. The massive global investments required to respond to the climate threat—to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can still avoid—is a chance to change all that; and to get it right this time. It could deliver the equitable redistribution of agricultural lands that was supposed to follow independence from colonial rule and dictatorship; it could bring the jobs and homes that Martin Luther King dreamed of; it could bring jobs and clean water to Native communities; it could at last turn on the lights and running water in every South African township. Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth. The
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
I honestly don’t believe that design is the most important matter today. Instead, I believe we should focus first on understanding computation. Because when we combine design with computation, a kind of magic results; when we combine business with computation, great financial opportunities can emerge. What is computation? That’s the question I would get asked anytime I stepped off the MIT campus when I was in my twenties and thirties, and then whenever I left any technology company I worked with in my forties and fifties. Computation is an invisible, alien universe that is infinitely large and infinitesimally detailed. It’s a kind of raw material that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, and it’s what powers the internet at a level that far transcends the power of electricity. It’s a ubiquitous medium that experienced software developers and the tech industry control to a degree that threatens the sovereignty of existing nation-states. Computation is not something you can fully grasp after training in a “learn to code” boot camp, where the mechanics of programming can be easily learned. It’s more like a foreign country with its own culture, its own set of problems, and its own language—but where knowing the language is not enough, let alone if you have only a minimal understanding of it.
John Maeda (How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us)
But the sovereign cannot make the whole of his presence felt to keep his regents in their duty. Therefore he needs a controlling body; this body, whether its place is above the government or at his side, will in time tried to seize it, thus joining in one the two capacities of regent and overseer, and thereby securing for itself, unlimited authority of command. This danger leads to a multiplication of precautions; the Power and its controller are, by a division of functions, or a rapid succession of officeholders, crumbled up into small pieces, a cause of weakness and disorder in the administration of society's business. Then, inevitably, the disorder and weakness becoming at length intolerable, bring together again the crumbled pieces of sovereignty - and there is Power, armed now with the despotic authority. The wider the conception held in the time when the monopoly of it seemed a vain imagining, of the right of sovereignty, the harsher will be the despotism. If the view is that a community's laws admit of no modification whatsoever, the laws will contain the despot. Or if the view is that something of these laws, corresponding to the ordinances of God, is immutable, that part at least will remain fast. And now we begin to see that popular sovereignty may give birth to the more formidable despotism than divine sovereignty. For a tyrant, whether he be one or many, who has by hypothesis, successfully usurped one or the other sovereignty cannot avail himself of the Divine Will, which shows itself to men under the forms of Law Eternal to command whatever he pleases. Whereas the popular will has no natural stability, but is changeable. So far from being tied to a law, its voice may be heard in laws which change and succeed each other. So that a usurping Power has, in such a case, more elbow-room; it enjoys more liberty, and its liberty is the name of our arbitrary power.
Bertrand de Jouvenel (ON POWER: The Natural History of Its Growth)
Page 7: (H)e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the 'ethical cosmos' [the dual code of Amity and Enmity] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. … Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process … Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure. Page 25: Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?
Arthur Keith
This almost miraculous performance was due to the working of the balance of power, which here produced a result which is normally foreign to it. By its nature that balance effects an entirely different result, namely, the survival of the power units involved; in fact, it merely postulates that three or more units capable of exerting power will always behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units against any increase in power of the strongest. In the realm of universal history balance of power was concerned with states whose independence it served to maintain. But it attained this end only by continuous war between changing partners. The practice of the ancient Greek or the Northern Italian city-states was such an instance; wars between shifting groups of combatants maintained the independence of those states over long stretches of time. The action of the same principle safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Minster and Westphalia (1648). When, seventy-five years later, in the Treaty of Utrecht, the signatories declared their formal adherence to this principle, they thereby embodied it in a system, and thus established mutual guarantees of survival for the strong and the weak alike through the medium of war. The fact that in the nineteenth century the same mechanism resulted in peace rather than war is a problem to challenge the historian. The entirely new factor, we submit, was the emergence of an acute peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as outside the scope of the state system. Peace with its corollaries of crafts and arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Church might pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of state action it would nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments subordinated peace to security and sovereignty, that is, to intents that could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate means. Few things were regarded as more detrimental to a community than the existence of an organized peace interest in its midst. As late as the second half of the eighteenth century, J. J. Rousseau arraigned trades people for their lack of patriotism because they were suspected of preferring peace to liberty. After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution in establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and throne started out on the denationalization of Europe. Their arguments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the nascent economies.
Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time)
so much government debt, it seems clear that civics infrastructure is being built very greedily in an unsustainable manner.  Contrarily, business and citizens have maintained
Thomas E Kurek (Economic Sovereignty: Prosperity in a Free Society)
When asked a general question about his Hashimite cousin, Abu Sufyan began to belittle him, and said: “Let him not cause thee any anxiety; his importance is less than thou hast heard it to be,” but the Emperor immediately cut him short with more particular questions, and having received a precise answer on every point, he summed up his conclusion as follows: “I asked thee about his lineage, and thou didst affirm that it was pure and of the best amongst you; and God chooseth no man for prophet save him who is of the noblest lineage. Then I asked if any of his kinsmen had made claims the like of his, and thou saidst nay. Then I asked them if he had been dispossessed of sovereignty and had made this claim for the sake of recovering it, and again thine answer was nay. Then I asked thee about his followers, and thou said they were the weak and the poor and young slaves and women, and such have been the followers of the prophets in all times. Then I asked if any of his followers left him and thou saidst none. Even so is the sweetness of faith: once it hath entered the heart, it departeth not away. Then I asked if he were treacherous, and thou didst answer nay; and verily if what thou hast told me of him to be the truth, he will vanquish me here where now I stand, and I would I were with him, that I might wash his feet. Go ye now about your business.
Martin Lings (Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources)
Saloninus once said: when the last witness is finally dead, the truth becomes malleable, before setting hard. Memories, the past, are a territory with disputed sovereignty. But when the last witness dies, those memories are nobody’s business but yours; you own them outright; they’re yours to do what you like with.
K.J. Parker (Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder (Corax Trilogy #3))
A society that could finally feed everyone, not just a chosen few; that could relieve the poverty and misery of even the weakest and least productive of its members; that recognized the sovereignty of the individual and his rights, and agreed to leave him alone to pursue his own ends; that put a premium on treating others with kindness and deference rather than disdain and exploitation; and, finally, that a society that recognized that it was better to do business with other nations than to try to conquer them, was not one on the verge of tyranny, but just the opposite. These were the conditions of modern liberty.
Arthur Herman (How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It)