Gordon, I think I have found the source of your first quotation on the state - the Webcrawler search engine came to my aid where Google had failed.
Many references suggest it is Henry George (1839-1897) US writer, politician and political economist. But this doesn't seem right to me. George was a supporter of state ownership in a number of areas including railway tracks, the telegraph service, water and, most strikingly, land - or, technically, the economic rent from land which he thought should be captured by the state through taxation. Private ownership of economic rent he saw as the primary cause of poverty. All of this doen't square with my initial understanding of the quotation which was that it is an anti-state sentiment.
However, another source cites William Graham Sumner and gives the text of his paper "What Makes the Rich Richer and the Poor Poorer?" (Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XXX, 1887, pp. 289-296) in which the phrase certainly does appear. Sumner was an early US sociologist - the first to teach a university course entitles Sociology (at Yale), a supporter of laissez-faire, free-market economics, and a vehement critic of socialism. That sounds like your boy.
