Might Makes Right Quotes by Abraham Lincoln, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Edward Snowden, Seneca the Younger, John Peter Altgeld, Bruno Bettelheim and many others.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against “might makes right”!
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.
