Ray Stannard Baker Quotes

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

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

The lawlessness of frontier life in America has been pictured as a remarkable phenomenon. In reality, it was the natural consequence of indiscriminate mixing of volatile substances.

When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.

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

I fear that unless the general government will assume the responsibility of order throughout the land, the anarchy which is now present will become more terrible than has ever been known in the history of the world.

Simply eight young men … standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundation of another not yet laid …. No police were functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of the administration hung idle, battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions.

… representatives of those forces which simmer beneath the surface of every civilized community and if they could break out, would destroy not only property and civilization but finally even themselves. .

An uncontrollable situation, in which there are no clearly defined spheres of authority, has come about in the country. Under these conditions, normal life is impossible.

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

I just think it's really upsetting when you see a community just go out and burn down stores and trash cars.

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

Lynch mobs are democracies.

A lynch mob is [unlimited] Majority Rule stripped of its fancy trappings and its facade of respectability.

On one side the government, the other side the mob.

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

There is no greater evil than anarchy.

The real breeders of discontent and alien doctrines of government and philosophies subversive of good citizenship are such as these who take the law into their own hands.

The city and province were given up to anarchy; the coloured people, elated with victory, proclaimed the slaughter of all whites, except the English, French, and American residents.

When anarchy is declared, the first thing we do, let's kill all the anarchists.

Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core.

Let me completely condemn these sickening scenes; scenes of looting, scenes of vandalism, scenes of thieving, scenes of people attacking police, of people even attacking firefighters. This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

What would happen if we withdrew? Anarchy and confusion.