Contracting State

Famous quotes containing the words contracting and/or state:

“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)