Time & Perspective Quote by John Gilmour

“Violence is always the last option” opens like a pledge to restraint, the kind of sentence a politician uses to sound civilized, procedural, safe. Then the hinge swings: “but if that time comes, it is the ONLY option.” The line isn’t really about limiting violence; it’s about monopolizing legitimacy. Once a threshold is declared crossed, debate is framed as naive, compromise as cowardice, and dissent as obstruction. The word “always” performs morality; the word “ONLY” performs authority.

The specific intent is to justify escalation while preserving the speaker’s self-image as reasonable. It preemptively answers the accusation that violence is impulsive or cruel: no, it was forced, reluctantly, by circumstance. That rhetorical move matters because it converts a political choice into an inevitability. “That time” stays conveniently undefined, letting leaders slide the goalposts: today’s emergency can be tomorrow’s precedent.

The subtext is a warning disguised as prudence. It tells opponents: you can keep talking, but we decide when talk ends. It tells supporters: when force arrives, stop asking questions and start calling it necessity. In early 20th-century politics, with labor unrest, colonial policing, and nationalist movements all colliding, this kind of language helped normalize state power as both patient and absolute. The sentence’s elegance is also its danger: it wraps a blank check in the vocabulary of last resorts, turning violence into a moral finale rather than a political failure.