Richard Maxwell Brown > Quotes

“A man is not born to run away." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1921).*”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“Following the Civil War, Americans began to perceive it new version of the earlier land-population-wealth crisis as an alarming trend of land consolidation and enclosure threatened the small landholders of the West. Henry George of San Francisco, later to be famous as the author of Progress and Poverty, articulated the new perception. George's social philosophy was moored in it deep belief in the homestead ethic.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“Where one, without fault is placed under circumstances sufficient to excite the fears of it reasonable man that another designs to commit it felony, or some great bodily injury upon him, and to afford grounds for reasonable belief that there is imminent clanger of the accomplishment of his design, lie may, acting under these fears alone, slay his assailant and be justified by the appearances. And as where the attack is sudden and the danger inuninent, lie may increase his peril by retreat; so situated, he may stand his ground ... and .slay his aggressor, even if it he proved lie might more easily have gained by Jli~rht.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“Should your opponent threaten you, you must not defend yourself with violence until you have attempted to get away-to flee from the scene altogether. If you are unable to leave the scene, you may not stuud your ground and kill in self-defense.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“Western Civil War of Incorporation”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“Because the gunfight near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, a year and a half after the Mussel Slough shootout, took place in a classic Western mining boomtown and involved classic Western social types
(famed gunfighters against cowboys), the 'tombstone battle and its participants were enshrined in the West of' myth and legend.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“A recent widely publicized case unites themes of no duty to retreat and, in individual terms, conquest and mastery. This was the case of the so-called "mountain man," Claude Dallas, who gained his livelihood in the i 97os and i9Hos by trapping animals in the wild, isolated country of desert and mountains where the three states of' Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada converge.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“There was a logic behind the English cocoon-law requirement of a duty to retreat in a threatening situation: it was that the state-the Crown-wished to retain a monopoly of the resolution of conflict at the level of' dispute between individuals.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“The new surveillance is spearheaded by burgeoning, ever-more-sophisticated electronic means that include-among a staggering array of devices-potent lasers, parabolic microphones and other "bugs" with more powerful transmitters, subminiature tape recorders, improved remote camera and videotape systems, advanced ways of seeing in the dark, voice-stress analyzers, and powerful new tracking cfevices.o'h.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“It is these
conceptual categories of incorporatior gunji{~/iterc and resister gunfighters and not the mythical categories of' hero and villain that are the keys to unlocking the reality behind the myth of the American as gunfighter.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“Indeed, the tendency of the Americain iiuud seems to he very strongly against the enforcement of any rule which requires a person to flee when assailed"-even to save human life'' In effect, Niblack held that the duty to retreat was a legal rationale for cowardice and that cowardice was simply un-American.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“With a significant reduction in crime and with other changes in the American and international order of the Will of the century front the twentieth to the twenty-first, will the traditional American attitude of no duty to retreat become obsolete”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“In late twentieth-century America, this "jurisprudence of lawlessness" is a bit out of (fate. While there is a vigorous victim-rights movement in our nation'' and increasingly strong compassion for the victims of rape,7 the day is long since past when rapists are routinely lynched as in Kernan's time. The killing of the seducer of a virgin is no longer it common occurrence, and unapologetic traducers of women stand in little danger of being shot.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“What might have developed into it great controversy in England over the duty to retreat failed to occur in the absence of conditions like those of America where it turbulent new society made the issue an important one.-”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“Kearney did not go as far in geographic distance as he did in mode of livelihood: although he only went across San Francisco Bay to Alameda County, he went much further in the change of his career, for this erstwhile drayman ended his days as a well-to-do commodity market speculator'4 -the very sort of thing he had so ardently attacked in speech after speech delivered to cheering working men in the sandlots of San Francisco.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“Although Holmes's apothegm, "detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife," is sometimes quoted, Holmes scholars have generally ignored the case of Brown v. United States. Holmes's opinion in Brown v. United States strongly upholds the bellicose doctrine of no duty to retreat-a bellicosity that apparently contradicts the values of civility and tolerance seen as the hallmarks of Holmes's classic opinions upholding the widely admired liberal doctrine of civil liberties.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society

“The particular no-duty-to-retreat walkdown that occurred in the public square of the remote southwest Missouri town of Springfield in July 1865 received national publicity, and in its aftermath the duty to retreat became a legal issue. Whether or not it was actually the first walkdown, the gunfight in Springfield was the effective beginning of the walkdown tradition, for it was the first to receive wide public recognition as such._,i In this case, the victorious gunfighter was Eisenhower's fondly remembered hero, Wild Bill Hickok.”
― Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society