Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.

Satan, Paradise Lost by Milton

Force is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.


Simone Weil, The Illiad, Or The Poem of Force