Coercive Quotes & Sayings

Violent men, and men in authority over violent men, and the broader public that authorises those men, are not yet shamed by the harm of coercive control over women ... Maybe we can rest some hope on the growing activity of men of goodwill calling on each other to change. When that group hits a critical mass, the majority of men will be more likely to want to change. — Lee Lakeman

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men. — Judith Lewis Herman

[W]e must first experience the kingdom if we are even to know what kind of freedom and what kind of equality we should desire. Christian freedom lies in service, Christian equality is equality before God, and neither can be achieved through the coercive efforts of liberal idealists who would transform the world into their image. — Stanley Hauerwas

It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power. — Mary Parker Follett

Here effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other ... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience. — Christopher Hitchens

Governments and citizens blend together only in the imaginations of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens. There is no magic in a ballot box that makes government any less coercive. — James Bovard

True power is invisible and impeccable, like good taste. It is never clumsy or artless. Powerful people whisper, suggest, seduce, in order to coerce. They only use volume for effect. This is how you can tell a blowhard from a mogul ... Most powerful people don't need to coerce; their mere presence is coercive. — Lynda Obst

Market Anarchism is the doctrine that the legislative, adjudicative, and protective functions unjustly and inefficiently monopolised by the coercive State should be entirely turned over to the voluntary, consensual forces of market society. — Roderick T. Long

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premisses you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to beleive it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief. — Robert Nozick

The evil of the Holocaust was realized through the exercise of a certain kind of power - coercive power. It was a power that sought to dominate and control. It was a power legitimated through law, buttressed by propaganda, augmented by terror, and affected through all the institutions of society. — Mary Jo Leddy

I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. — Murray Rothbard

If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief - to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience - it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God. — Mitt Romney

[There is] a strange split in thinking common to those on the religious left, who are quick to denounce the profit motive and commercialism. Yet, they seem to think that the key to happiness is giving people more stuff - by enlisting the coercive power of government. This perverse way of thinking holds that 'social justice' demands that we take money from those who have earned it and give it to those who have less of it. That's not social justice; that's materialism. — Robert Sirico

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

We should distinguish at this point between "government" and "state" ... A government is the consensual organization by which we adjudicate disputes, defend our rights, and provide for certain common needs ... A state on the other hand, is a coercive organization asserting or enjoying a monopoly over the use of physical force in some geographic area and exercising power over its subjects. — David Boaz

Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. — Florence Nightingale

The freedom to talk with God and of God is being opened by God's joy. It cannot be forced. For true awareness cannot be coercive; it does not come about by either authoritarian pressure or the force of logic. It presupposes liberty. Being aware of God is an art and
if the term may be permitted
a noble game. — Jurgen Moltmann

Unless you're involved in the system of coercive force, with money alone you don't get power. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

I think that fear of the mob, the expectation that people, particularly poor and nonwhite people become mobs almost automatically in the absence of coercive authority, is inculcated by the media, the movies, and politicians. — Rebecca Solnit

A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. A decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized. — Noam Chomsky

For some reason Canon Fenneau made me feel a little uneasy. His voice might be soft, it was also coercive. He had small eyes, a large loose mouth, the lips thick, a somewhat receding chin. The eyes were the main feature. They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. His cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true, with eyes like that. In the manner in which he gave you all his attention there was a taste for mastery. — Anthony Powell

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in ... A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When you own gold you're fighting every central bank in the world. That's because gold is a currency that competes with government currencies and has a powerful influence on interest rates and the price of government bonds. And that's why central banks long have tried to suppress the price of gold. Gold is the ticket out of the central banking system, the escape from coercive central bank and government power. — James Rickards

Almost everywhere we find ... the use of various coercive measures, to rid ourselves as quickly as possible of the child withinus
i.e., the weak, helpless, dependent creature
in order to become an independent competent adult deserving of respect. When we reencounter this creature in our children, we persecute it with the same measures once used in ourselves. — Alice Miller

Spontaneous actions of individuals, aiming at nothing else than at the improvement of their own state of satisfaction, undermined the prestige of the coercive status system step by step. — Ludwig Von Mises

When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated. — Bell Hooks

In my experience, in bringing coercive diplomacy to bear against Slobodan Milosevic, no bomb strike was more important than maintaining NATO's cohesion. — Wesley Clark

Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse. — Michel Foucault

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working. — Adrienne Rich

But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones. — Steven Pinker

Authoritative leaders mobilize people toward a vision. Affiliative leaders create emotional bonds and harmony. Democratic leaders build consensus through participation. Pacesetting leaders expect excellence and self- direction. Coaching leaders develop people for the future. And coercive leaders demand immediate compliance. — Daniel Goleman

People of faith should not invoke the power of the state to decide what everyone can believe or think or read or do. In such cases, like abortion or prayer or prohibition or sexual identity, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the free conscience of each person, not the coercive rule of secular law. — Edward Kennedy

The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat. — Grover Norquist

While it is positive for young black males and females to learn discipline and self-responsibility, those attitudes, values, and habits of being can be taught with pedagogical strategies that are liberatory, that do not rely on coercive control and punishment to reinforce positive behavior. — Bell Hooks

Today's unions are less Mobbed-up than those of yesteryear to be sure, but they're hardly above tactics that would be considered intimidating and coercive. — Jonah Goldberg

Proselytizing is only wrong if coercive or deceptive. Coercion, whether violent or not, is immoral, just as deception is immoral. — David Novak

It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus. — Murray N. Rothbard

Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state ' and nothing else — Ayn Rand

After the Democrats shoved the 2700 pages of ObamaCare down our throats - and we did find out how expensive, controlling, and coercive the legislation was - a majority of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to toss it aside as unconstitutional. — Bob Beauprez

Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter. — Bell Hooks

A huge majority of parents use some form of physical or verbal aggression against children. Since women remain the primary caretakers of children, the facts confirm the reality that given a hierarchal system in a culture of domination which empowers females (like the parent-child relationship) all too often they use coercive force to maintain dominance. In a culture of domination everyone is socialized to see violence as an acceptable means of social control. Dominant parties maintain power by the threat (acted upon or not) that abusive punishment, physical or psychological, will be used whenever the hierarchal structures in place are threatened, whether that be in male-female relationships, or parent and child bonds. — Bell Hooks

The moment you frame your own awareness within a second level of self -consciousness is the moment your mind is most up for grabs ... You're safe because you have an ironic distance from the coercive techniques I'm employing. All of them that is, except this one. Are you on your guard yet? Does it feel good? Of course not. — Douglas Rushkoff

In stark contrast with the views of the Greek philosophers and with those of the rest of western intellectuals to the present day, Chinese Taoist thought always defended individual liberty and laissez-faire while attacking the systematic and coercive use of violence typical of government. — Jesus Huerta De Soto

March 1774 by declaring the port of Boston closed until the East India Company had been compensated for its losses. This was the first of the so-called Coercive Acts - a series of laws passed in 1774 in which the British attempted to assert their authority over the colonies but instead succeeded only in enraging the colonists further and ultimately prompted the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775. It is tempting to wonder whether a government less influenced by the interests of the company might have simply shrugged off the tea parties or come to some compromise with the colonists. — Tom Standage

Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet. Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe. — Pitirim Sorokin

If one assumes, as I do, that battery is caused by the belief permeating this culture that hierarchical rule and coercive authority are natural, then all our relationships tend to be based on power and domination, and thus all forms of battery are linked. — Bell Hooks

As long as sexist thinking socializes boys to be "killers," whether in imaginary good guy, bad guy fights or as soldiers in imperialism to maintain coercive power over nations, patriarchal violence against women and children will continue. — Bell Hooks

I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum. — William Weld

Consider the sexual harassment which continually occurs between a secretary and a boss ... while objectionable to many women, [it] is not a coercive action. It is rather part of a package deal in which the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job, and especially when she agrees to keep the job. The office is, after all, private property. The secretary does not have to remain if the 'coercion' is objectionable. — Walter Block

It is regarded as axiomatic that parents have more power then children. This is an inescapable biological fact; young children are completely dependent on their parents or other caring adults for survival. — Judith Lewis Herman

No bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint. — Leo Strauss

Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text - compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping - what is this, electroshock torture? — Ursula K. Le Guin

Coercive redistribution of wealth through government's abuse of law and misapplication of rights destroys individual liberty; ambition, productivity, and wealth; and the purpose of the commonwealth. — Mark R. Levin

Ethically, I think pretty much every code of ethics for doctors suggests that they should not be in an interrogation room, particularly if there's anything coercive or abusive going on. — Jane Mayer

There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive. — Eric Hoffer

Learning is too precious to be motivated by coercive tactics. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another. — Vladimir Lenin

Anarchists believe that we can govern ourselves in the absence of coercive and centralized authority; the underlying premise about human nature (to use an infinitely problematized but necessary term here) is fundamentally positive. And the evidence that in disasters people are really pretty kind, generous, brave, resourceful and creative fed that. — Rebecca Solnit

The real transgression occurs when religion wants government to tell citizens how to live uniquely personal parts of their lives. The failure of Prohibition proves the futility of such an attempt when a majority or even a substantial minority happens to disagree. Some questions may be inherently individual ones, or people may be sharply divided about whether they are. In such cases, like Prohibition and abortion, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the conscience of the individual, not the coercive power of the state. — Edward Kennedy

The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles. — Noam Chomsky

The disciples of Jesus were not to practice politics through the use of coercive power, but through servanthood. — Tim Otto

Who says "hypothesis" renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true. — William James

Collectivists would have you believe that individualism is merely another word for selfishness, because individualists oppose welfare and other forms of coercive redistribution of wealth, but just the opposite is true. Individualists advocate true charity, which is the voluntary giving of their own money, while collectivists advocate the coercive giving of other people's money; which, of course, is why it is so popular. — G. Edward Griffin

Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled "the meanest and worst of all forms of Government." For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions. — Nancy Isenberg

Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited
or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society. — Errico Malatesta

The population explosion is an ecological phenomenon of displacement. Unless we solve that ecological problem of displacing people - to build huge dams, to build motorways, to take away what people need in order to survive - we will keep pumping more and more money into population programs. We will have more and more coercive and violent methods through which women's bodies are treated as experimental grounds for new contraceptives. Yet we will not have a solution to the problem of numbers. — Vandana Shiva

The Left has failed to understand the extent to which its intolerant, often coercive, approach to issues that permit good-willed disagreement has turned off voters who might otherwise be sympathetic to their general program. — Ian Tuttle

It is absolutely unacceptable to talk to Russia - or anyone for that matter - in the language of ultimatums and coercive measures. — Sergei Lavrov

Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of self-defense
as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved, and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm. Putting to one side the opportunities offered by the coercive power of fear, charity obliges me to assume that their alarm is genuine, though i grant that in doing so I again raise questions about the soundness of their judgment. — Marilynne Robinson

Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. — Ayn Rand

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union. — Rudolf Rocker

Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work. — Friedrich Hayek

Reflecting this difference is the Indian state of Kerala. Although it is one of the poorer parts of the country, it has higher literacy and greater gender equality than much of the rest of India. Without resorting to a coercive approach such as a "one-child policy" Kerala has achieved a rate of population growth lower than China's and also lower than that in some developed countries, including — Peter Singer

Coercive power is the curse of the universe, coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul. — Mary Parker Follett

Though both partners may wish for reconciliation, their unspoken goals are often sharply in conflict. The abuser usually wishes to reestablish his pattern of coercive control, while the victim wishes to resist it. — Judith Lewis Herman

Persuasion has become a kind of force. The more the advertiser knows about what consumers want, and the more desires the product and packaging seek to fulfill, the more coercive the force. — Virginia Postrel

Many criminologists believe that the source of the state's pacifying effect isn't just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace. After all, no state can post an informant in every pub and farmhouse to monitor breaches of the law, and those that try are totalitarian dictatorships that rule by fear, not civilized societies where people coexist through self-control and empathy. A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan's back is turned. — Steven Pinker

The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The legitimacy of coercive acts in a democracy arises from the process by which they are justified and by the degree to which we regard decisions as rational. If the justifications proceed properly, through recognized public institutions, and if they make sense to us, they are legitimate. — Michael Ignatieff

Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don't own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coercive means, destroys industries. Organized labor is piracy without the boats and eye patches. Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor? — Douglas Wilson

Government is not peaceful; it is inherently coercive. — Ed Crane

Experience has taught us, that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures best calculated for their own good, without the intervention of a coercive power. — George Washington

I felt grand juries were illegal and coercive. — Bernadine Dohrn

In the politics of Jesus the world will be changed by non-coercive love or not at all. It's not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It's the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never can be. — Brian Zahnd

Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man. — Herbert Spencer

I think when you have lawyers arguing over whether you can keep a detainee at 46 degrees ... for two hours, that's not torture. It may be unpleasant, it may be coercive ... but let's say what torture actually is, and that's not it. — Alex Berenson

Anarchism is opposed to states, armies, slavery , the wages system, the landlord system, prisons, monopoly capitalism, oligopoly capitalism, state capitalism, bureaucracy, meritrocracy, theocracy, oligarchy, governments, patriarchy, matriarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, protection rackets, intimidation by gangsters, and every other kind of coercive institution. In other words, anarchism opposes government in all it's forms. — Donald Rooum

The government's coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power. — Sheldon Richman

When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean's office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age-old capacity to be insurgent. — Rollo May

Liberalism is, in fact, the ideology of the capitalist revolution that prodigiously raised the living standards of the mass of people; a doctrine gradually elaborated over several centuries, which offered a new concept of social order, encompassing freedom in the only form suited to the modern world. Step by step, in practice and theory, the various sectors of human activity were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of coercive authority and given over to the voluntary action of self-regulating society. — Ralph Raico

This was to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue to its impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel. — Marcel Proust

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births. — John Holdren

The coercive power of government is always a beacon to those who want to dominate others
summoning the worst dregs of society to Washington to use that power to impose their will upon others. — Harry Browne

Coercive measures may have a restraining effect for a time, but can never subdue an untractable spirit: it is only by engaging the affections and enlarging the understanding, that the heart can be meliorated or principles be formed; for like a bow forcibly bent, the mind recoils from oppression with elastic power. — Mary Hays

But a planet can also become dark because of "too strong a desire for security ... the greatest evil there is." Meg resists her father's analysis. What's wrong with wanting to be safe? Mr. Murry insists that "lust for security" forces false choices and a panicked search for safety and conformity. This reminded me that my grandmother would get very annoyed when anyone would talk about "the power of love." Love, she insisted, is not power, which she considered always coercive. To love is to be vulnerable; and it is only in vulnerability and risk - not safety and security - that we overcome darkness. — Madeleine L'Engle

When the power, prestige, and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. — Hugo Black

Democracy, like any non-coercive relationship, rests on a shared understanding of limits. — Elizabeth Drew

If on one day we find the fast-spreading recognition of popular rights accompanied by a silent, growing perception of the rights of women, we also find it accompanied by a tendency towards a system of non-coercive education
that is, towards a practical illustration of the rights of children. — Herbert Spencer