Robert McNamara Quotes

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

Compulsion destroys cooperation.

Once a person insists on how you are to think he immediately begins to insist on how you are to behave.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

Coersion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.

Force works on servile natures, not the free.

A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels 'free', but the objectionable control of force.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

I'd rather control someone than be controlled.

I don't like being victimized by a machine or by other people's demands on my time. I become resentful by feeling forced or incentivized to live a life I don't want to live. That rage in general prevents me from entirely becoming enslaved by technology.

The use of force to liberate people is very different from the use of force to suppress or control them, or even to defeat them.

Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.

Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.

Nobody wants to feel controlled or treated like a child.

I don't want anyone controlling me.

You can't try to keep someone against their will, or it's difficult to get them to listen or have the right mentality.

If you are not free to say no, your yes is meaningless.

Any act of violence creates resentment and resistance, because humans were meant to be free.

We may indeed in counsel point to the higher road, but we cannot compel any free creature to walk upon it. That leadeth to tyranny, which disfigureth good and maketh it seem hateful.

Sex, drugs, money, power etc. Just because you get to choose your master doesn't mean you aren't a slave.