Might Makes Right Quotes

• If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Children, Home, Might

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1983). “Family politics: love and power on an intimate frontier”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• Lets have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Life, Faith, Freedom

  Address at Cooper Institute, New York, N.Y., 27 Feb. 1860

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• The doctrine that might makes right has covered the earth with misery. While it crushes the weak, it also destroys the strong. Every deceit, every cruelty, every wrong, reaches back sooner or later and crushes its author. Justice is moral health, bringing happiness, wrong is moral disease, bringing mortal death.

  John Peter Altgeld

  Crush, Strong, Justice

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• Might does not make right! Right makes right!

  T. H. White

  Doe, Might

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• It has been said of the world's history hitherto that might makes right. It is for us and for our time to reverse the maxim, and to say that right makes might.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Inspirational, World, Might

  Abraham Lincoln (1982). “Abraham Lincoln, wisdom & wit”, Peter Pauper Pr

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• We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

  Anna Quindlen

  America, Might, Conviction

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.170, Ballantine Books

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• But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

  Adin Ballou

  Crush, Army, Careers

  Adin Ballou (1848). “Christian non-resistance, in all its important bearings, illustrated and defended”, p.87

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• Successful crime is dignified with the name of virtue; the good become the slaves of the wicked; might makes right; fear silences the power of the law.

  Seneca the Younger

  Successful, Law, Names

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• The [George W.] Bush administration marked a very serious and profoundly negative turning point - not just for the nation, but for the international order, because we started to govern on the idea of "might makes right." And that's a very old, toxic and infectious idea.

  Edward Snowden

  Order, Ideas, Toxic

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• What children learn from punishment is that might makes right. When they are old and strong enough, they will try to get their ownback; thus many children punish their parents by acting in ways distressing to them.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Strong, Children, Punishment

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• In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right"!

  I. L. Peretz

  Hate, Greed, Might

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