Life & Wisdom Quote by Elbert Hubbard

Hubbard delivers a moral indictment disguised as a simple causal chain: states kill, so citizens will, too. The line works because it refuses the comforting fiction that violence is a “bad apple” problem. It’s a culture-setting problem. If the most authoritative institution in society reserves the right to execute enemies and calls it justice, security, or patriotism, then it quietly licenses the same logic at street level. The word “example” is the blade here: government violence isn’t just policy; it’s pedagogy.

The subtext is aimed at the respectable classes who treat state killing as clean and necessary while condemning private revenge as savage. Hubbard collapses that distinction. “Enemies” is deliberately broad, smuggling war, capital punishment, and political repression into one category: sanctioned elimination of the other. He’s not arguing that individuals are innocent; he’s arguing they are imitative. Legitimacy trickles down.

Context matters. Hubbard wrote in an America that was flexing imperial muscle after the Spanish-American War, while lynching persisted domestically and anarchists were scapegoated as existential threats. Violence, both official and unofficial, was often framed as civic hygiene. Hubbard, a commercial-minded essayist with a reformist streak, punctures that sanitizing language. He implies that a society cannot preach restraint while practicing execution in uniform.

The “occasionally” is almost cynical: he concedes human impulse, but insists government makes it easier to justify. If you want fewer private killings, he suggests, stop teaching the lesson that killing enemies solves problems.