Andrew Jackson Quotes

Policy is not made with papers or ceremonies. Policy is made with iron and blood.

The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been.

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.

It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

We must accept the possibility of bloodshed if we are to bring about order.

Between the people and their enemies there can be nothing in common but the sword; we must govern by iron those who cannot be governed by justice; we must oppress the tyrant...

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

When [men] go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace.

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.

Whoever has an army has power and that war decides everything.

War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.

Repression is fantastic.

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

Five or six hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom and happiness.

Force is not a remedy.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

The power that is supported by force alone will have cause often to tremble.

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

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.

Power tends to get confused with repression.

History is a bath of blood.

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.

The great questions of the day are not to be decided by speeches and majorities ... but by iron and blood.