Quotes About Force

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]

Atrocitus: You believe fear to be the most powerful force in the universe? Fear is inaction. Fear is hiding away. Fear is cowering and begging. Rage is action. Rage is spilling blood. Sinestro: Rage is uncontrollable.

The word violence comes from roots that mean "the undue use of force." Thought that imposes or defends is violent.

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.

But evil is a cunning force. It can find the weakness in any man, even the bravest. [...] It only takes a single weak moment to let evil in.

A great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years.

[A]s if it were not the masterful will which subjugates the forces of nature to be the genii of the lamp... that forces a life-thought into a pregnant word or phrase, and sends it ringing through the ages!

One cannot subdue a man by holding back his hands. Lasting peace comes not from force.

In childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid and fresh, and sometimes hits with terrifying force.

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

So: Police are bureaucrats with weapons. If you think about it, this is a really ingenious trick. Because when most of think about police, we do not think of them as enforcing regulation. We think of them as fighting crime, and when we think of "crime," the kind of crime we have in our minds in violent crime. Even though, in fact, what police mostly do is exactly the opposite: they bring the threat of force to bear on situations that would otherwise have nothing to do with it.

Kandiaronk] swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.

Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

Do not force things.... Can you afford to be careless? So then, flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free; stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate. How else can you carry out your task? It is best to leave everything to work naturally, though this is not easy.21

And lastly Jung states (almost prophetically): A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.... Whenever we give up, leave behind. and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.92

Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

Those years [as the war progressed] would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

The British imperialist logic that led to the Opium Wars reflected this: there was a lot of silver in China, so the idea was to sell Indian opium to the Chinese, get all that silver out in that lucrative sale, and thereby pay for all the goods that were being produced in Manchester and sent to India. When the Chinese resisted opening their doors to the opium trade, the British response was to knock them down with military force.

The only way to bring Democrats down to earth, where they might feel subject to the same standards as everyone else, is to attack them with the same moral force they use to prosecute their mission; the only way to do it is to turn their fire on them. To do this, Republicans need to direct their arrows at the Achilles' heel of the Democratic Party: its monopoly control of the inner cities of America and its responsibility for the misery and suffering inside them.

Nature is always too strong for principle.

Rousseau is] the person whom I most revere both for the Force of [his] Genius and the Greatness of [his] mind [...]

Not to mention that a crown is too high a reward ever to be given to merit alone, and will always induce the candidates to employ force, or money, or intrigue, to procure the votes of the electors: so that such an election will give no better chance for superior merit in the prince, than if the state had trusted to birth alone for determining the sovereign.

So great is the force of laws, and of particular forms of government, and so little dependence have they on the humors and tempers of men, that consequences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced from them, as any which the mathematical sciences afford us. . . . It may . . . be pronounced as an universal axiom in politics, That an hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their representatives, form the best monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.