4 Quotes by Joseph Reese Strayer

A man can lead a reasonably full life without a family, a fixed local residence, or a religious affiliation, but if he is stateless he is nothing. He has no rights, no security, and little opportunity for a useful career. There is no salvation on earth outside the framework of an organized state.

But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, or involving really large numbers of people in its political life (p. 11)

...what we are looking for is the appearance of political units persisting in time and fixed in space, the development of permanent, impersonal institutions, agreement on the need for authority which can give final judgments and acceptance of the idea that this authority should receive the basic loyalty of its subjects.

In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13)