Quotes About Coercion

“Derived from the Greek word anarchos, "without authority," anarchism denies law and considers property to be tyranny. Anarchists believe that human corruption results when differences are enforced through the maintenance of property and authority. Anarchists do not oppose or deny governance as long as it exists without coercion and the threat of violence. They oppose and deny the authority of the centralized state and propose governance through collaboration, deliberation, consensus, and common coordination. Justice can emerge from a sense of common purpose and practices of mutual aid, not the monopoly on violence that the state demands. While anarchism is commonly associated with bloody violence and rage, anarchists believe deeply in an ideology of love.”

— Siva Vaidhyanathan

“They support freedom for themselves and slavery for everyone else, and they use the freedom of the market to disguise this fact. Economic coercion is just a different form of force, which they couple with the fraud of calling it freedom. I was like them, but I will never be like them again.”

— Robert Peate

“What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we wished to pursue it, and what sort of commitments we wish to make to them in the process? Equality, then, would simply be a matter of guaranteeing equal access to those resources needed in the pursuit of an endless variety of forms of value. Democracy in that case would simply be our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems-since problems there will always be-a capacity that can only truly be realized once the bureaucracies of coercion that hold existing structures of power together collapse or fade away.”

— David Graeber

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself ... A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

— John Steinbeck

“Like most Americans I am no lover of cops, and the consistent investigation of city forces for bribery, brutality, and a long and picturesque list of malfeasances is not designed to reassure me. However, my hostility does not extend to the state troopers now maintained in most parts of the country. By the simple expedient of recruiting intelligent and educated men, paying them adequately, and setting them beyond political coercion, many states have succeeded in creating elite corps of men, secure in their dignity and proud of their service. Eventually our cities may find it necessary to reorganize their police on the pattern of the state police. But this will never happen while political organizations retain the slightest power to reward or to punish.”

— John Steinbeck

“All Welsh knew was that he was scared shitless, and at the same time was afflicted with a choking gorge of anger that any social coercion existed in the world which could force him to be here.”

— James Jones

“Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.”

— Allen Ginsberg

“The World. Hugo had once told Nathaniel in Will's presence, was made by many men, but shaped by few. The important thing was to be one of those few; to find a place in which you could change the repetitive patterns of the many Through political influence and intellectual discourse, and failing either of these , through benign coercion.”

— Clive Barker

“Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another. Free action, in which a person pursues his own aims by the means indicated by his own knowledge, must be based on data which cannot be shaped at will by another.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

“Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good ...”

— Barry Unsworth

“The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.”

— George Eliot

“Milo had been earning many distinctions for himself. He had flown fearlessly into danger and criticism by selling petroleum and ball bearings to Germany at good prices in order to make a good profit and help maintain a balance of power between the contending forces. His nerve under fire was graceful and infinite. With a devotion to purpose above and beyond the line of duty, he had then raised the price of food in his mess halls so high that all officers and enlisted men had to turn over all their pay to him in order to eat. Their alternative - there was an alternative, of course, since Milo detested coercion and was a vocal champion of freedom of choice - was to starve.”

— Joseph Heller

“Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated - a system of checks and balances.”

— Milton Friedman

“Law is any application for the official use of coercion that succeeds.”

— Bob Black

“The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.”

— Murray Rothbard

“Language is the continuation of coercion by other means."
"Bullshit. It's cooperation." Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren't as contradictory as they sounded.”

— China Miéville

“As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

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

— Christopher Lasch

“Nobody owns anything to rob ... As for violence ... Oiie, would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing," Ann liked to say
it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours. "There is only one reason for doing something. And that's because you want to." Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.”

— John Le Carré

“Guidance is creative, efficacy develops, people give shape, implements complete.  That is why all people honor guidance and value efficacy.  The nobility of guidance and the value of efficacy are not granted by anyone, but naturally so of themselves.  Guidance creates, nurtures, develops, matures, brings to fruition, nourishes, sustains, and shelters. It is creative without possessiveness, constructive without conceit, develops without coercion; this is called unobtrusive efficacy.”

— Lao Tzu

“Your impulse to protect me conflicts with my need to protect my self-respect. Sorry. Besides. I have this vaguely uneasy feeling you're offering to protect me from you. That's not doing me a kindness
that's coercion.”

— Joe Hill

“People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!”

— Karen Armstrong

“In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public.”

— Murray Rothbard

“There are two principles between which there can be no compromise-liberty and coercion.”

— Frédéric Bastiat

“The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.”

— Steven Pinker

“Tennessee will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand, if necessary, for the defense of our rights, or those of our Southern brethren.”

— Isham G. Harris

“Magic is the envelopment and coercion of the objective world by the ego; it is a dynamic subjectivism. Religion is the coercion ofthe ego by gods and spirits who are objectively conceived beings in control of nature and man.”

— Richard Chase

“Republics demanded virtue. Monarchies could rely on coercion and "dazzling splendor" to suppress self-interest or factions; republics relied on the goodness of the people to put aside private interest for public good. The imperatives of virtue attached all sorts of desiderata to the republican citizen: simplicity, frugality, sobriety, simple manners, Christian benevolence, duty to the polity. Republics called on other virtues
spiritedness, courage
to protect the polity from external threats. Tyrants kept standing armies; republics relied on free yeomen, defending their own land.”

— James Monroe

“Coercion. The unpardonable crime.”

— Dorothy Richardson

“An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion soon degenerates. For force always attract men of low morality.”

— Albert Einstein

“Over the next 20 to 30 years, we are going to end up with world government. It's inevitable ... There's going to be conflict, coercion and consensus. That's part of what will be required as we give birth to the first global civilization.”

— Jim Garrison

“[Statists] believe that government should make decisions for individuals. Since individuals usually prefer to make their own decisions, coercion and compulsion become necessary correctives.”

— Theodore J. Forstmann

“Government means politics, and interference by government carries with it always the implication of coercion. We may accept the expanding power of bureaucrats so long as we bask in their friendly smile. But it is a dangerous temptation. Today politics may be our friend and tomorrow we may be its victims.”

— Owen D. Young

“We should respect each other as rational beings by trying to achieve our goals through reason and persuasion rather than threats and coercion.”

— Ron Paul

“Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“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.”

— Michael Sandel

“One ... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.”

— Sigmund Freud

“Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism - the belief that the individual exists to serve others - is translated into political reality.”

— Nathaniel Branden

“Can the mind become completely still without coercion, without compulsion, without discipline?”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.”

— Ayn Rand

“Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.”

— Noam Chomsky

“Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.”

— Joseph Campbell

“Tyrants always condemn and seek to replace the market process with government coercion because tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do.”

— Walter E. Williams

“It [the free market] is an organizational way of doing things, featuring openness, which enables millions of people to cooperate and compete without demanding a preliminary clearance of pedigree, nationality, color, race, religion, or wealth. It demands only that each person abide by voluntary principles, that is, by fair play. The free market means willing exchange; it is impersonal justice in the economic sphere and excludes coercion, plunder, theft, protectionism, and other anti-free market ways by which goods and services change hands.”

— Leonard Read

“The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“Learn to lead in a nourishing manner.
Learn to lead without being possessive.
Learn to be helpful without taking the credit.
Learn to lead without coercion.”

— Laozi