“The bureaucracy that controlled the former “Old Empire” was from an ancient space opera society, run by a totalitarian  confederation of planetary governments, regulated by a brutal social, economic, and political hierarchy, with a royal monarch as its figurehead.   This type of government emerges with regularity on planets where the citizens abandon personal responsibility for autonomous, self-regulation.”

— Excerpted from the Top Secret transcripts published in the book, Alien Interview

“Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.  Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

— Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January 1776