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Thus, anybody who follows this nature and gives way its states will be led into quarrels and conflicts, and go against the conventions and rules of society, and will end up a criminal.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

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

Perpetrators absolve their harmful behavior as serving worthy causes.

Every state has not only the right but the duty to make adequate provision for its own defense in the way it thinks best, providing it does not do so at the expense of any other state.

One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Violence is not to be undertaken by private persons. If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person. It purports to be judge of its own interest.

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

The will to survive is not as important as the will to prevail... the answer to criminal aggression is retaliation.