If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim.
— Jeff Cooper
Inspiring Self Defense quotations
When a government betrays the people by amassing too much power and becoming tyrannical, the people have no choice but to exercise their original right of self-defense — to fight the government.
Laws that forbid the carrying of arms .
. . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.
If you find yourself under lethal attack don't be kind. Be harsh. Be tough. Be ruthless.
Karate is not a game. It is not a sport. It is not even a system of self-defense. Karate is half physical exercise and half spiritual. The karateist who has given the necessary years of exercise and meditation is a tranquil person. He is unafraid. He can even be calm in a burning building.
Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who kept their swords.
The right of self-defense never ceases.
It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals.
A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense.
Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life--be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others...I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba's child [a child of God] becomes ambiguous, tentative and confused
Self defense is a primary law of nature, which no subsequent law of society can abolish; the immediate gift of the Creator, obliges everyone to resist the first approaches of tyranny.
Your mind-set is your primary weapon
A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense.
Self-defense is Nature's eldest law.
A people armed and free, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression.
I used to be someone who would not even tread on an ant.
But this is a war for honor and self-defense. A 100 percent elimination policy (by Ankara of the Kurds) has forced me to defense and it has become a glorious defense of a people.
When the mask of self-righteousness has been torn from us and we stand stripped of all our accustomed defenses, we are candidates for God's generous grace.
The Black Panther party of Self-Defense is a revolutionary party.
No possible future government in Kabul can be worse than the Taliban, and no thinkable future government would allow the level of Al Qaeda gangsterism to recur. So the outcome is proportionate and congruent with international principles of self-defense.
When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood NOT as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.
The challenge to America is to extend to Asia the defensive shield of American power in forms consonant with Asian freedom and self-respect.
It is true that a victim who fights back may suffer for it, but one who does not almost certainly will suffer for it.
A kata is not fixed or immoveable. Like water, it's ever changing and fits itself to the shape of the vessel containing it. However, kata are not some kind of beautiful competitive dance, but a grand martial art of self-defense - which determines life and death.
Never assume that simply having a gun makes you a marksman.
You are no more armed because you are wearing a pistol than you are a musician because you own a guitar.
When under attack, it is necessary to evaluate the situation and to decide instantly upon a proper course of action, to be carried out immediately with all the force you can bring to bear. He who hesitates is indeed lost. Do not soliloquize. Do not delay. Be decisive.
I've come to believe that total nakedness, that is absolute transparency, that is utter and unfettered and profound visibility, is the only way that we can truly love. Anything less, is self-defense.
We are fully justified in valuing the life and person of an intended victim more highly than the life of a pernicious assailant. The attacker must be stopped. At once and completely.
I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense.
Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.
Self-defense is not just a set of techniques;
it’s a state of mind, and it begins with the belief that you are worth defending.
The average beast of prey is a decent creature who merely kills for the sake of food or in a fight against an enemy. It is only man who calls killing "sport" and kills for the pleasure of killing; not for food, not for self-defense, but just to satisfy some primitive instinct, once necessary and now perverted.
The way to reason with a predator is to make it aware that it can live in a cage, or it can die, but it can no longer prey upon us.
[Self-defense is] justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the laws of society.
Anyone who willfully and maliciously attacks another without sufficient cause jeopardize the lives of others.
The best form of self defense is to become invisible... If you can't do that learn Wing Chun!
The best personal defense is an explosive counterattack.