Bob Black Quotes

Law is when you don't have a method of solving a problem... It's just nailing a proclamation on a wall saying, 'Don't do this.'

A portion of the multitude must ever be coerced.

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe.

Government is force.

A man with a club is a law-maker.

In all governments, there must of necessity be both the law and the sword; laws without arms would give us not liberty, but licentiousness; and arms without laws, would produce not subjection, but slavery. The law, therefore, should be unto the sword what the handle is to the hatchet; it should direct the stroke and temper the force.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

What is this thing we call government? Is it anything but organized violence? The law orders you to obey, and if you don't obey, it will compel you by force - all governments, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or fear of punishment.

When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.

Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe,--human or divine. A law is not law without coercion behind it.

States are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power

Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power.

The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative.

The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.

Might was the measure of right.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

A law is not a law without coercion behind it.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

The most celebrated system of jurisprudence known to the world begins, as it ends, with a Code.

We have hardly an adequate idea how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving tone and character to the mass of society.

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

The constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right but questions of might.

If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That's the way it's done in the U.S., and that's the way it's done in Russia.