Robert J. Ringer Quotes

Everybody created his own justice and administered it for himself…. It was justice administered directly by the people in the complete absence of regular judicial bodies.

A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.

Our supreme governors, the mob.

History of Ireland—lawlessness and turbulency, robbery and oppression, hatred and revenge, blind selfishness everywhere—no principle, no heroism.

There is no more justice in France. There is only the revolver.

Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate … neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding states…. Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order

Americans have always understood the danger of mobs. They are always dangerous; they are always demonic.

Lynch mobs are democracies.

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.

Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.

The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

Punitive murder by the police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and probably still exists in most.

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

The tyranny of a multitude [mob] is a multiplied tranny.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

History has shown that when justice is not served in a legal capacity, some people will take matters into their own hands.

Turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.

Gentlemen, all power is, or ought to be, accomplished by responsibility. Tyranny is irresponsible power. This definition is equally true, whether the power be lodged in one or many; — whether in a despot, exempted by the form of government from the control of the law; or in a mob, whose numbers put them beyond the reach of the law. Idle, therefore, and absurd, to talk of freedom where a mob domineers!

Let us not be carried away by the undisguised agitations of leaders who virtually asked people to take the law into their own hands.

I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.

One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.

This spirit of mob-law is becoming as great an evil as a servile war.

Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.

There is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another.