Quotes & Sayings About Deadly Force

Whenever an art form - music, book, drama, song - is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art - even the obscene, semiliterate yawp and grunt of rap - drains the life from it. — Paul Theroux

The killing happened amid an outburst of deadly violence across the District that claimed six lives in six days. The victims include a community news reporter who police said was waiting for a bus when she was shot by someone aiming at another person; and a motorist killed when a passenger opened fire from another vehicle on the Anacostia Freeway. The killings bring the District's homicide count to 50, up from 45 at this time last year. At Friday night's vigil, Gliss's pastor, Bishop Melvin G. Brown of Greater New Hope Baptist Church, acknowledged national attention on police use of deadly force. But he urged mourners to address dangers closer to home. "Can we be real tonight?" Brown said. "Most of the violence, most of the killing comes from us killing other folk. Young black folk killing other young black folk. — Anonymous

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force
if necessary
to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security. — John F. Kerry

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state. — Chris Hedges

Bosch knew that department policy held that deadly force was justified if it was used to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to an officer or a citizen. Mendenhall was not required to identify herself or give Ellis the opportunity to drop his weapon. — Michael Connelly

The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research. — Elizabeth Blackwell

A half century ago Herbert Wechsler could justify the legal right of deadly force self-defense in terms of the "universal judgment that there is no social interest in preserving the lives of the aggressors at the cost of those of their victims." That is not a universal judgment today. — Don Kates

We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it. — C. G. Jung

Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being. Perhaps the only more terrifying prospect is that such a fate should befall us or our loved ones. This is why we, a representative cross-section of America's population, keep deadly weapons for personal defense. — Massad Ayoob

Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is no question that Darren Wilson caused the death of Michael Brown by shooting him, but the inquiry does not end there. The law authorizes a law enforcement officer to use deadly force in certain situations. The law allows all people to use deadly force to defend themselves in certain situations. — Robert P. McCulloch

It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. It is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes, but the fact that the police arrive a little late or are a little slower afoot does not always justify killing the suspect. — Byron White

Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar — Barbara Brown Taylor

One cannot have a right to life without the right to defend it with deadly force. — Bruce Montague

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect."

[I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must (Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2015)] — Salman Rushdie

This book will prove the following ten facts:
1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.
2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch.
3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
4. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, the result is a family fight.
5. Music does not always sooth the troubled beast.
6. An Englishman's home is his castle.
7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
8. One black eye deserves another.
9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm.
10. It pays to increase your word power. — Diana Wynne Jones

The life of comparison is deadly. One is always more than or less than and it is based upon a brief proof which tends to be seen as emotional but is in fact bereft of emotion. Comparison is so subtle a force it exposes itself in the guise of emotion to protect its own cunning from being seen as the judgmental emphasis it is. — Michael Burkard

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were. — Richard Yates

Since 2015, the media and the public have paid more attention than ever before to the use of deadly force by American police officers. That's a great thing. The more questions the public asks, the more the public demands police produce believable, transparent evidence that they are treating people fairly, the better off our nation will become. You will see how true this is throughout this book, but until 2015, not many Americans had noticed that the data gathering done by the government on this subject was, to put it mildly, really bad. — Nick Selby

these models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about which data to pay attention to - and which to leave out. Those choices are not just about logistics, profits, and efficiency. They are fundamentally moral. If we back away from them and treat mathematical models as a neutral and inevitable force, like the weather or the tides, we abdicate our responsibility. And the result, as we've seen, is WMDs that treat us like machine parts in the workplace, that blackball employees and feast on inequities. We must come together to police these WMDs, to tame and disarm them. My hope is that they'll be remembered, like the deadly coal mines of a century ago, as relics of the early days of this new revolution, before we learned how to bring fairness and accountability to the age of data. Math deserves much better than WMDs, and democracy does too. — Cathy O'Neil

Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force. — P. J. O'Rourke

Instead he was summoning his last tension, like a bowman drawing the cord of a hunting bow an extra inch to give the arrow deadly force, then Steapa howled like an animal and charged. Weland charged too and they met like stags in the rutting season. The Danes and Norsemen had crowded around, making a circle that was limited by the spears of Sigefrid's bodyguard, and the watching warriors gave — Bernard Cornwell

Love is the greatest force on earth to resist, limit and ultimately halt evil's deadly progression. — James Robison

Pastor Bob's breakthrough twenty years earlier had been the discovery that while Americans were hungry for spiritual nourishment, they wanted it bland and easy to digest - the religious equivalent of fast food. All that New Testament stuff about self-sacrifice and forgiveness puzzled them mightily. So Pastor Bob preached the Christian virtues of feeling good, relieving stress, getting rich, and hiring abundant deadly force to protect the good people from the bad. — Tony Hendra

[W]hile the use of non-lethal weapons such as tasers and LEDIs may not necessarily reduce the number of civilian casualties, they have been largely accepted as the humane alternative to deadly force because they make the use of force appear far less dramatic and violent than it has in the past.
Contrast, for instance, the image of police officers beating Rodney King with billy clubs as opposed to police officers continually shocking a person with a taser. Both are severe forms of abuse. However, because the act of pushing a button is far less dramatic and visually arresting than swinging a billy club, it can come across as much more humane to the general public. This, of course, draws much less media coverage and, thus, less bad public relations for the police. — John W. Whitehead

Nobody from the Amazing Kingdom bothered to check with previous employers, such as the New York City Police Department, to inquire about allegations of bribery, moral turpitude, substance abuse, witness tampering and the unnecessary use of deadly force, to wit, the pistol-whipping of a young man suspected of shoplifting a bag of cheese-flavored Doritos. — Carl Hiaasen

[A] person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if: (1) He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself. — Lisa Bloom

Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from the failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. — Byron White

Once the spark catches, once the prepared, courageous combination of camp, melody, enigma, fantasy, paranoia, electric guitars, shock, male make-up and flirtation took hold, and he found himself at last in the right place at the right time, nothing can stop the momentum from growing. Repressed fantasies, forbidden pleasures, rule-breaking spirit and highly suggestive erotic discrepancies are released with tremendous force into the mainstream. They make it there mostly through Bowie's insatiable mind and body, which has adopted the perfect disguise of an ambiguously sexy, deadly smart and attractively damaged pop star. — Paul Morley

In secrecy, in silence, a whole race may be destroyed without notice. Whole cultures and species have been destroyed while men smiled and spoke of economics, of employment, of progress, of the welfare of mankind. Is a threat less deadly because it does not scream and rage and threaten force of arms? — Sheri S. Tepper

Imagine how a Teddy Kennedy or a Bill Clinton would take the news that one woman in ten, say, has the power to resist his blandishments by deadly force, and you'll get a perfect idea of how a Charles Schumer or a George Bush feels about armed taxpayers. — L. Neil Smith

If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there, who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies; and wrenched them from the stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were men who cast their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire, and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of one drunken lad - not twenty, by his looks - who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot; melting his head like wax. — Charles Dickens

And it's deadly to us. We can inspire lust, but it's just a shadow. An illusion. Love is a dangerous force." He shook his head. "Love killed the dinosaurs, man."
I'm pretty sure a meteor killed the dinosaurs, Thomas."
He shrugged. "There's a theory making the rounds now that when the meteor hit it only killed off the big stuff. That there were plenty of smaller reptiles running around, about the same size as all the mammals at the time. The reptiles should have regained their position eventually, but they didn't, because the mammals could feel love. They could be utterly, even irrationally devoted to their mates and their offspring. It made them more likely to survive. The lizards couldn't do that. The meteor hit gave the mammals their shot, but it was love that turned the tide. — Jim Butcher

Come, Friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?
Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you.
And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?
The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life
A deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you,
Death and the strong force of fate are waiting.
There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon
When a man will take my life in battle too
flinging a spear perhaps
Or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow. — Homer

Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving - childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health - poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious,frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion. — Patrick O'Brian

The one thing government has which we (you or I or any corporation) DON'T have, is the ability to use deadly force to accomplish its goals. — Neal Boortz

The rules also explicitly stated that carrying a shovel, standing on a rooftop while speaking on a cell phone, or holding binoculars or being out after curfew constituted hostile intent, and we were authorized to use deadly force. — Iraq Veterans Against The War

For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force. — Meg Wolitzer

Government can only do two things: It can beat people up and kill them. Or it can threaten to do so. When it seems to be doing something else - for example, handing out money or, say, surplus cheese - what's actually going on is that something has been taken away from one set of individuals by deadly force or the threat of deadly force, a hefty middleman's fee deducted, and whatever is left thrown to peasants delighted to receive stolen goods. — L. Neil Smith