Top Coercion Quotes

On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between...

To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect...

Coercion Definition

(n.) The act or process of coercing.

(n.) The application to another of either physical or moral force. When the force is physical, and cannot be resisted, then the act produced by it is a nullity, so far as concerns the party coerced. When the force is moral, then the act, though voidable, is imputable to the party doing it, unless he be so paralyzed by terror as to act convulsively. At the same time coercion is not negatived by the fact of submission under force. "Coactus volui" (I consented under compulsion) is the condition of mind which, when there is volition forced by coercion, annuls the result of such coercion.

Sin, on the contrary, is the pursuit of legitimate self-regarding interests at the expense of the neighbor, by spending our time and talents figuring out ways of exploiting them.

Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business...because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people.

History is the same story with different costumes.

The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. T...

Absolutes are Coercion.Change is absolute.

The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being...

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to...

Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.