“No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.”
On the Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)
Context: What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily — whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence — whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
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Robert F. Kennedy 72
American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy 1925–1968Related quotes
“Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”
Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 192)
Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 14, There Are Alternatives, p. 313
“[…] the uncontrolled causes which may influence the result are always strictly innumerable.”
The Design of Experiments (section II.9, eighth edition, 1971, Hafner Publishing Company, New York) as quoted by George Casella in Statistical Design (p. 18, 2008, Springer).
Since 1960s
Source: Problems and theories of philosophy, 1949, p. 49, as cited in Łukasiewicz, 2016.
“Riot is the voice of the unheard.”
Los Angeles Times (4 May 1992)
The Tonight Show, November 7, 2005, as reported on miquelon.org
French Bashing and Francophobia
Patheos, Weighing in on Godzilla http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2014/06/08/weighing-in-on-godzilla/ (June 8, 2014)