Quotes About Coercion

This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

I felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of my skull. That's exactly what you think it is, a calm voice said. Yo do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your cortical stack out of that wall for weeks.

This was what Moscow had intended: peasants must be coerced into doing things that left no way back into normal life. To "get them to join the revolution," the Party had decreed, "there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.

Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, only in a more polite form: it does not throw you out, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will.

The man who coerces another not to eat fish commits more violence than he who eats it.

[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own.

Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.

Laws, however divine in origin and institution, would be found of little coercion among men, were the administration of them not committed to mortals.

What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.

The spark of liberty in the mind and spirit of man cannot be long extinguished; it will break into flames that will destroy every coercion which seems to limit it.

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

The government forces you to give your money to things you don't believe in, to have your money go to projects that might be inherently immoral.

Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.

An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.

Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence against the innocent.

Using coercion to drive charity is like using kidnapping to create love.

The decisive means for politics is violence.

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

Coersion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.

There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion.