Coerce Quotes

• A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

  James A. Garfield

  Law, Coercion, Intriguing

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• A man has to learn that he cannot command things, but that he can command himself; that he cannot coerce the wills of others, but that he can mold and master his own will: and things serve him who serves Truth; people seek guidance of him who is master of himself.

  James Allen

  Inspirational, Men, People

  James Allen (2007). “The Life Triumphant: Mastering the Heart and Mind”, p.52, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point.

  Aldrich Ames

  Mean, Anxiety, Consistency

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• Love has its own time, its own season, and its own reasons from coming and going. You cannot bribe it or coerce it or reason it into staying. You can only embrace it when it arrives and give it away when it comes to you.

  Kent Nerburn

  Love, Wise, Wisdom

  Kent Nerburn (2014). “Letters to My Son: A Father's Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love”, p.169, New World Library

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• My life is simple, my food is plain, and my quarters are uncluttered. In all things, I have sought clarity. I face the troubles and problems of life and death willingly. Virtue, integrity and courage are my priorities. I can be approached, but never pushed; befriended but never coerced; killed but never shamed.

  Yi Sun-sin

  Life, Courage, Badass

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• She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.

  Margaret Sanger

  Men, States, Babe

  Margaret Sanger (2005). “Woman and the New Race”, p.100, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

  Theodor Adorno

  Mean, Break Through, Coercion

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.38, Univ of California Press

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• It seems to me, and I am personally convinced, that the Church must never speak from a position of strength. [These are shocking words.] It ought not to be one of the forces influencing this or that state. The Church ought to be, if you will, just as powerless as God himself, which does not coerce but which calls and unveils the beauty and the truth of things without imposing them. As soon as the Church begins to exercise power, it loses its most profound characteristic which is divine love [i.e.] the understanding of those it is called to save and not to smash.

  Anthony of Sourozh

  Spiritual, Exercise, Profound

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

  Charles Koch

  Power

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• Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Truth, War, Heart

  Mahatma Gandhi (2005). “All Men Are Brothers”, p.68, A&C Black

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

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Men, Violence, He Man

  Mahatma Gandhi (1950). “Hindu Dharma”

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• That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.

  William James

  Independent, Mean, Reality

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.27, 谷月社

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• As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

  Gore Vidal

  Class, Majority, Problem

  Gore Vidal (2004). “Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia”, p.45, CLAIRVIEW BOOKS

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• One essential of a free government is that it rest wholly on voluntary support. And one certain proof that a government is not free, is that it coerces more or less persons to support it, against their will.

  Lysander Spooner

  Government, Support, Essentials

  Lysander Spooner (1867). “No Treason: No. 1-”

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• A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.

  Herbert Spencer

  Freedom, Men, Liberty

  Herbert Spencer (1978). “The Principles of Ethics”

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• In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels.

  Kate Millett

  Sex, Grief, Order

  Kate Millett (2000). “Sita”, p.178, University of Illinois Press

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• Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Truth, Land, People

  Speech in Holland, 3 August 1929, in Lilly Heber 'Krishnamurti' (1931) ch. 2

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• The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

  Edward Abbey

  Mean, Men, Ideal Society

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.17, RosettaBooks

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• I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.

  Edward Abbey

  Hero, Army, Men

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• The most fundamental paradox is that if we're never to use force, we must be prepared to use it and to use it successfully. We Americans don't want war and we don't start fights. We don't maintain a strong military force to conquer or coerce others. The purpose of our military is simple and straightforward: we want to prevent war.

  Ronald Reagan

  Strong, Military, War

  "The uncommon wisdom of Ronald Reagan: a portrait in his own words".

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• Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Reality, People, Different

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• I hold strongly to this: that it is better to be impetuous than circumspect; because fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Submissive, Beats, Fortune

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• 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

  Freedom, Mean, Men

  Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.15, University of Chicago Press

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• The assertion that it is the intention of the German Reich to coerce the Austrian State is absurd!

  Adolf Hitler

  War, World, Intention

  Adolf Hitler (1944). “Hitler's Words”

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• True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.

  Larry Wall

  Inspiring, Greatness, Giving

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