Without action, words are just words. Without violence, laws are just words. Violence isn’t the only answer, but it is the final answer.

When someone tells a man to be a man, they mean that there is a way to be a man. A man is not just a thing to be-it is also a way to be, a path to follow and a way to walk. Some try to make manhood mean everything. Others believe that it means nothing at all. Being good at being a man can't mean everything, and it has always meant something.

A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.

Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction.

Sometimes men pick fights just for something to do-just to feel something like the threat of harm and the possibility of triumph.

Civilization comes at a cost of manliness. It comes at a cost of wildness, of risk, of strife. It comes at a cost of strength, of courage, of mastery. It comes at a cost of honor. Increased civilization exacts a toll of virility, forcing manliness into further redoubts of vicariousness and abstraction.

Relieved of moral pretense and stripped of folk costumes, the raw masculinity that all men know in their gut has to do with being good at being a man within a small, embattled gang of men struggling to survive.