Ross Winn

“ The pen of the statesman is worthless unless it is backed by the sword of the soldier. War has enslaved humanity, and by war humanity has broken its chains and widened the horizon of freedom. War is denounced. ”

“ In this case the czar, who is himself a typical "man on horseback," demonstrates the relative consequences of the non-resistant as compared with the non non-resistant, in the estimation of the grafters. The parasites of social order respect the non-resistants, even mention them by name in their newspapers. If you had a fellow in a box and you were sitting comfortably on the cover, you would naturally commend him for keeping quiet. The political, financial and priestly parasites of our blessed social order have the rest of humanity in a box. ”

“ Napoleon was the agent of catastrophy. You cannot measure Voltaire by Napoleon, any more than you can measure Napoleon by Voltaire. You can only judge them both, as you judge all other men, by the single standard of achievement. ”

“ The intellectual ink-slinger without a platoon of police behind him can no more change the order of events than a politician can eliminate the acquired propensity for roundabout lying. And when we come to analyze the world's last word on social ethics and political morals, all the chatter about equity, and the conception of right and justice, is nothing but the puril palaver of babbling balderdash, which, summed up and boiled down, amounts to about half a pint of humbug. ”

“ The pen is impotent without the sword. The might of the pen is greatly overrated. If I could marshal half a million muskets behind my pen, every issue of the Firebrand would effect stock quotations and create more anxiety in international cabinets than the Panama revolution. ”

“ But in the last analysis every civilization is the child of war and every social order is founded on physical force. The sword and the pen have always been partners, and together the statesman and the soldier have wrought ”

“ But in every case the code was for the dupes to obey and the grafters to ignore. The end of all laws and moral codes is graft. It is only in barbarian countries, where the ethics of might are not disguised as a moral code, that the grafter is unknown.
There is no personality so pleasing to a tyrant as the non-resistant. The czar permits even a Tolstoy to have being in his dominions, tho Tolstoy proclaims himself a disbeliever in all human authority. Kropotkin, who believes very much the same things that Tolstoy does, was fired out of those same dominions p. ”

“ The man on horseback is the predominant figure of history. In the final analysis it is cold, brutal physical force that gives vitality to ideas. As long as Christianity was purely an intellectual force, the chief activity of its exponents was directed to getting out of the way of the gaoler and executioner. ”

“ They esteem the non-resistants underneath very highly. If everybody in the box were non-resistants, or even passive resistants, all would be lovely for the sitters on the box cover. Nothing would so much disturb them as the presence in the box of a man on horseback. ”