Quotes
Quotes about Force
All that a good government aims at...is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.
Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
Government is beating into submission, imprisoning, and killing...The authority of man-made law is entirely due to weapons of the constables who enforce obedience to its provisions.
Men resort to talking only when they haven't the power to enforce their convictions upon others.
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.
The celebration of unbounded individualism means, beyond some point, the acceptance of force- either private (crime, riot, vigilanteism) or public (authoritarianism).
Freedom...refer[s] to a social relationship among people- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.
Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.Vitality springs from diversity- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces- alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
The part of our social order which can or ought to be made a conscious product of human reason is only a small part of all the forces of society.
...whenever it is necessary that one of several conflicting opinions should prevail and when one would have to be made to prevail by force if need be, it is less wasteful to determine which has the stronger support by counting numbers than by fighting. Democracy is the only method of peaceful change that man has yet been discovered.
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.
Letters, from absent friends, extinguish fear, Unite division, and draw distance near; Their magic force each silent wish conveys, And wafts embodied though, a thousand ways: Could souls to bodies write, death's pow'r were mean, For minds could then meet minds with heav'n between.
Leave the poor Some time for self-improvement. Let them not Be forced to grind the bones out of their arms For bread, but have some space to think and feel Like moral and immortal creatures.
'Tis true no lover has that pow'r T' enforce a desperate amour, As he that has two strings t' his bow, And burns for love and money too.
It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.
Reason's biological function is to preserve and promote life and to postpone its extinction as long as possible. Thinking and acting are not contrary to nature; they are, rather, the foremost features of man's nature. The most appropriate description of man as differentiated from nonhuman beings is: a being purposively struggling against the forces adverse to his life.
Because they know not the forces of nature, and in order that they may have comrades in their ignorance, they suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason...But we ask in all things a reason must be sought.
The power of habit and the charm of novelty are the two adverse forces which explain the follies of mankind.
Physicists have determined that even the most solid and heavy mass of matter we see is mostly empty space. But at the submicroscopic level, specks of matter scattered through a vast emptiness have such incredible density and weight, and are linked to one another by such powerful forces, that together they produce all the properties of concrete, cast iron and solid rock. In much the same way, specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything depends upon how solid the individual specks of knowledge are, and on how powerfully linked and coordinated they are with one another.
