Aggression

Aggression, in its broadest sense, is behavior, or a disposition towards behavior, that is forceful and hostile or attacking. It may occur either in retaliation or without provocation. In narrower definitions that are commonly used in psychology and other social and behavioral sciences, aggression involves an intention to cause harm, even if only as a means to an end. It has alternatively been defined as acts intended to increase relative social dominance. Predatory or defensive behavior between members of different species may not be considered aggression in the same sense. Aggression can take a variety of forms and can be physical or be communicated verbally or non-verbally. Aggression differs from what is commonly called assertiveness, although the terms are often used interchangeably among laypeople, e.g. an aggressive salesperson.

Quotes

B

This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.
- George H. W. Bush, remarks to reporters (5 August 1990).

C

The vast majority of the peoples of the world are against war and against aggression. If they make their wishes known and effective, war can be stopped. It all depends on whether they are willing to make the effort necessary for the purpose. For, that it will require an effort, no one who considers the history of the world on these subjects can doubt.
- Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, The Future of Civilization, Nobel Lecture (1 June 1938).

Is this a call to war? Does anyone pretend that preparation for resistance to aggression is unleashing war? I declare it to be the sole guarantee of peace. We need the swift gathering of forces to confront not only military but moral aggression; the resolute and sober acceptance of their duty by the English-speaking peoples and by all the nations, great and small, who wish to walk with them. Their faithful and zealous comradeship would almost between night and morning clear the path of progress and banish from all our lives the fear which already darkens the sunlight to hundreds of millions of men.
- Winston Churchill, Broadcast to the United States and to London, 16 October 1938

H

Every general reprisal is a hostile aggression.
- Heath, J., Beale v. Thompson (1803), 3 Bos. & Pull. 426; reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 10.

M

War no longer pays; there is no motive for aggression.
- Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government : The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944).

The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
- Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962), Chapter 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics, § 10 : The Concept of a Perfect System of Government.

P

Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.
- Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), page 26.

R

History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
- Ronald Reagan, Address to the nation from the White House (16 January 1984).

S

In our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt.
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980), p. 318.

We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women, preferentially mate with champions of human combat. When it’s the "right" type of aggression, we love it.
- Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017), p. 9.

T

We designate by the term "State" institutions that embody absolutism in its extreme form and institutions that temper it with more or less liberality. We apply the word alike to institutions that do nothing but aggress and to institutions that, besides aggressing, to some extent protect and defend. But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
- Benjamin Tucker, Address to Unitarian Ministers (1890).

Anarchists, whose mission in the world is the abolition of aggression and all the evils that result therefrom, perceived that, to be understood, they must attach some definite and avowed significance to the terms which they are obliged to employ, and especially to the words "State" and "government." Seeking, then, the elements common to all the institutions to which the name "State" has been applied, they have found them two in number: first, aggression; second, the assumption of sole authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.
- Benjamin Tucker, Address to Unitarian Ministers (1890).

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
- Benjamin Tucker, Address to Unitarian Ministers (1890).