Quotes About Coercion

These programs are like a finishing school. They teach you how to put the squeeze on people.

Human nature - the Thucydidean pantheon of fear, self-interest, and honor - makes for a world of incessant conflict and coercion.

Should I have held them down and poured boiling water over them until they talked? Really, I'd like your expert advice. "Of course not. You would use boiling oil.

Nations matter morally, when they do, as things desires by autonomous agents whose autonomous desires we ought to acknowledge and take account of, even if we cannot always accede to them. States, on the other hand, matter morally intrinsically. They matter not because people care about them, but because they regulate our lives through forces of coercion that will always require moral justification.

Some people say that we here have no freedom of religion, ... In reality, the people in that country are the ones who were forced to embrace a religion.

There's a statement in the Quran: There should be "absolutely no compulsion in religion."

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.

One can be coerced to church, but not to worship.

I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.

It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.

If we import compulsion in matters of religion, there is no doubt that we shall be committing suicide.

To change one's religion under the threat of force is no conversion but rather cowardice.

To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood or money.

To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion.

You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.' A

We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.

the monopoly of coercion, such as the public protection of slave capital in the United States before the Civil War—get capitalized into the prices of the assets to which they are attached.

In all practically relevant cases, governments—or more accurately the individuals involved in governmental process—do possess the power to coerce.

The great (American-definition) liberal Lionel Trilling wrote in 1948 that "we must be aware of the dangers that lie in our most generous wishes," because "when once we have made our fellowmen the objects of our enlightened interest [we] go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."18 Every mother knows the dangers. And when she loves the beloved for the beloved's own sake, she resists them.

Modern liberals do not sit anywhere along the conventional one-dimensional right-left spectrum of governmental coercion.

It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

Now, I ask, where among the delegated grants to the Federal Government do you find any power to coerce a State; where among the provisions of the Constitution do you find any prohibition on the part of a State to withdraw; and, if you find neither one nor the other, must not this power be in that great depository, the reserved rights of the States?