
“I do not believe in violence; it is the last resort of fools.”
Dawn (1884), CHAPTER XXI
Source: Saga, Vol. 1
“I do not believe in violence; it is the last resort of fools.”
Dawn (1884), CHAPTER XXI
Source: The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), Chapter 10 (p. 75)
“Designers should only innovate as a last resort.”
Source: Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. 1998, p. 373: Attributed to Charles Eames
Cooper vs. Terrorism https://www.sightm1911.com/lib/ccw/Cooper_vs_Terrorism.htm
Variant: One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that "violence begets violence." I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure — and in some cases I have — that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy.
Individual Liberty (1926), Passive Resistance
Context: When a physician sees that his patient's strength is being exhausted so rapidly by the intensity of his agony that he will die of exhaustion before the medical processes inaugurated have a chance to do their curative work, he administers an opiate. But a good physician is always loath to do so, knowing that one of the influences of the opiate is to interfere with and defeat the medical processes themselves. He never does it except as a choice of evils. It is the same with the use of force, whether of the mob or of the State, upon diseased society; and not only those who prescribe its indiscriminate use as a sovereign remedy and a permanent tonic, but all who ever propose it as a cure, and even all who would lightly and unnecessarily resort to it, not as a cure, but as an expedient, are social quacks.
p. 77 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89009314162&view=1up&seq=81
Determinism or Free-will? (1912)