Kenneth Kaunda Quotes

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.

The establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain it's control, kill us

Some people draw a comforting distinction between force and violence. I refuse to cloud the issue by such word-play. The power which establishes a state is violence; the power which maintains it is violence; the power which eventually overthrows it is violence. Call an elephant a rabbit only if it gives you comfort to feel that you are about to be trampled to death by a rabbit.

Force is not a remedy.

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

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

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.

One authority, one gun…

The state is force incarnate, its essence is command and compulsion.

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things - once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.

Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.

Repression is fantastic.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

Might was the measure of right.

You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Power tends to get confused with repression.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority!