“Perhaps justified violence is better than peace at any price.”

— Edmund Cooper

The Uncertain Midnight (1958)

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Edmund Cooper 52

British writer 1926–1982

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“Most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty.”

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“In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”

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“And so I am not concerned to justify the perpetrators of violence but to enquire into the function of the violence of the working classes in contemporary socialism.”

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Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 42

“Perhaps justified violence is better than peace at any price.”

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Edmund Cooper 52

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