Quotes About Coercion

Am I bad?" He puffed angrily on his pipe. "Why does the law create such absurdities?" He snorted. "The law. The law is an ass. Someone famous said that, once. Dickens, I think." He looked up to Goodrich. "And it is. It doesn't respond anymore. It's a straitjacket. What kind of coercion is it when your alternatives are to kill or to go to jail?

If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one's choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil." With literary belief, however, "one is always free to choose not to believe." This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its "reality.

I've done many things in my role. I've ended the lives of those who deserved death for what they'd done. I've trained women, broken men, coaxed powerful people to trust us when they never should have. I've stolen and plundered, ravaged and destroyed. But now Sadie holds in front of me what I want but can't demand, coerce, or force: her adoration. Her respect. Hell, her trust.

Persuasion should come before force. In any case it is the availability of raw power, not the use of it, that makes for effective diplomacy.

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

Men can be attracted but not forced to the faith. You may drive people to baptism, (but) you won't move them one step further in religion.

Norman Kunc, who conducts workshops on inclusive education and non-coercive practices, points out that "what we call 'behavior problems' are often situations of legitimate conflict; we just get to call them behavior problems because we have more power" than children do. (You're not allowed to say that your spouse has a behavior problem.)

In an autobiographical essay published in 1946, Albert Einstein reflected on his days as a student of physics some fifty years earlier. He recalled his teachers with affection but, referring to exams, said, "This coercion had such a deterring effect that after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

Some who support more coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled—those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which then is used to justify the use of control.

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.

A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

The court can, and must, only maintain its legitimacy through the dispensation of justice, not by coercion and censorship.

If physical power be the fountain of law, then law and force are synonymous terms. Or, perhaps, rather, law would be the result of a combination of will and force; of will, united with a physical power sufficient to compel obedience to it, but not necessarily having any moral character whatever.

When economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace.

The power of a good idea is that it convinces people to change their behaviour themselves – no physical coercion is required. Do it right, and they'll even think it was their own idea.

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion. When we do, these are legitimated as a proper way of life. God saves by loving and including, not by excluding or punishing.

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion.

I just want you to know that if you ever need my help again, you'll have to blackmail me.

It is the very use of coercion, positive or negative, that breaks or deadens the spirit, which is the source of motivation.

Most power is power to coerce somebody. We don't have the power to coerce anybody.

In this world, all power rests upon force.

Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power.

Give you a reason on compulsion! if reasons were as plenty as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.