The notion that we’ve made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat of such violent force behind it, all law would be meaningless. I prefer stories that remind us of that. At its core, history is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun.

Every single time it was grand. I loved the moment when you announce the stickup and everything suddenly goes brighter and sharper and the world seems to spin faster. You show them the gun and say hand it over and there’s no telling what’s going to happen in the next tick of the clock.

Without the right to defend yourself – and the right to possesss the means to do it – all other supposed rights are so much hot air.

It was my grandmother who first told me that a woman marries a man in the belief that he’ll change but he doesn’t – and a man marries a woman in the belief that she won’t change but she does.

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance ‘do the right thing.’ Well, as many have discovered, you don’t really know what you’ll do in the dark till the lights go out.

History is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun.

If you’re afraid to defend your convictions because you might get your ass kicked for it, you’re not really fit to advocate for them.

Violence is the most elemental truth of life. It’s the central shaper of history, the ultimate determiner of whether A or B is going to get his way.

The family landed in the Western Hemisphere in the person of Roger Blake Wolfe, who arrived with a price on his head.

Profanity is the linguistic crutch of inarticulate fuckheads.