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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Power: The ability to force or coerce someone to do your will, even if they would choose not to, because of your position or your might.

  James Hunter

  Power, Might, Force

  James C. Hunter (2004). “The World's Most Powerful Leadership Principle: How to Become a Servant Leader”, p.53, Crown Business

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• Trying to do good to people without God's help is no easier than making the sun shine at midnight. You discover that you've got to abandon all your own preferences, your own bright ideas, and guide souls along the road our Lord has marked out for them. You mustn't coerce them into some path of your own choosing.

  Therese of Lisieux

  Ideas, People, Shining

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• Often men's impulses to coerce and degrade women seem to express not a confident assumption of dominance but a desire to retaliate for feelings of rejection, humiliation, and impotence: as many men see it, they need women sexually more than women need them, an intolerable balance of power.

  Ellen Willis

  Men, Rejection, Feelings

  Ellen Willis (2012). “No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays”, p.33, U of Minnesota Press

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• A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is . It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Believe, Two, Trying

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.121, Open Road Media

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• We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility; no button reading "positive attitude" protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Attitude, Reading, Heart

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Full House”, p.47, Harvard University Press

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• On the one hand, society needs a common faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time.

  Jacques Barzun

  Hands, Two, Soul

  "Bernard Shaw in Twilight". The Kenyon Review, 1943.

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• The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.

  Moses Mendelssohn

  Law, Giving, Needs

  Moses Mendelssohn (1838). “Jerusalem; a Treatise on Ecclesiastical Authority and Judaism”, p.22

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• The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something "meaningful," we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Meaningful, Strong, Giving Up

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• It has been observed, [that for the federal government] to coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Government, States, Projects

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• Nothing trains and teaches so powerfully as love. Love attracts. it does not coerce. If the aim of parents is to teach their children to love God they must show their love for Him by loving each other and loving the children.

  Elisabeth Elliot

  Children, Parent, Doe

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• 40% of homicides go unsolved. You know, it's not a very good record. And, also, 95% of convictions in America come from plea bargaining, which is often coerced. It's like we have the worst of both worlds. We don't convict the guilty enough, and we coerce the innocent too much.

  Bill Maher

  America, Records, World

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