Top 35 Jack Donovan Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Jack Donovan

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

— Jack Donovan

3. “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.”

— Jack Donovan

4. “Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the alpha virtues of men all over the world. They are the fundamental virtues of men because without them, no “higher” virtues can be entertained. You need to be alive to philosophize. You can add to these virtues and you can create rules and moral codes to govern them, but if you remove them from the equation altogether you aren’t just leaving behind the virtues that are specific to men, you are abandoning the virtues that make civilization possible.”

— Jack Donovan

5. “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.”

— Jack Donovan

6. “Being good at being a man isn’t a quest for moral perfection, it’s about fighting to survive. Good men admire or respect bad men when they demonstrate strength, courage, mastery or a commitment to the men of their own renegade tribes. A concern with being good at being a man is what good guys and bad guys have in common.”

— Jack Donovan

7. “If you’re going to be a master of your own life and your own world, you choose your values.”

— Jack Donovan

8. “The natural gods of men are other men, mythic or real, who embody manhood in men’s eyes.”

— Jack Donovan

9. “Life is conflict; peace is death. Forces of chaos keep the cycles of history moving.”

— Jack Donovan

10. “Better to live vigorously, better to fight, than to simply wait for the end... in peace.”

— Jack Donovan

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

— Jack Donovan

12. “Honor Diversity” is an interesting slogan, because it essentially means “honor everyone and everything.” If everyone is honored equally, and everyone’s way of life is honored equally, honor has no hierarchy, and therefore honor has little value according to the economics of supply and demand. “Honor diversity” doesn’t mean much more than “be nice.”

— Jack Donovan

13. “Good, modern, civilized Western white men are so easily cowed by charges of bias and privilege that they work tirelessly to outdo each other with social displays of moral universalism – by cucking themselves in every way imaginable. Western.”

— Jack Donovan

14. “Vulnerability invites violence.”

— Jack Donovan

15. “Strength isn’t the only quality that matters. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. Strength is rarely a disadvantage.”

— Jack Donovan

16. “A child is a child, but an incompetent adult is a beggar.”

— Jack Donovan

17. “If you are never truly challenged in a meaningful way and are only required to perform idiot-proofed corporate processes to get your meat and shelter, can you ever truly be engaged enough to call yourself alive, let alone a man?”

— Jack Donovan

18. “If anything has made men more effeminate in the past half-century, it’s been the running feminist critique of masculinity.”

— Jack Donovan

19. “No matter how exotic or seemingly different another man is, there’s always some reflection of self in another male.”

— Jack Donovan

20. “Men who don’t care about what the other men think of them aren’t dependable or trustworthy.”

— Jack Donovan

21. “Strength is the ability to exert one’s will over oneself, over nature and over other people.”

— Jack Donovan

22. “The man who wants to be great believes that he is worthy of greatness. And it is so because he makes it so.”

— Jack Donovan

23. “What’s the point in trying if you know the game is rigged? For the satisfaction of knowing you are contributing to the greater good? That’s just the kind of stupid thing an intellectual would say.”

— Jack Donovan

24. “Western men are supposed to constantly ask women for permission and make sure women don’t feel threatened or undermined in any way. When.”

— Jack Donovan

25. “The Empire sells superficial identities that are fleeting, synthetic, empty and unsatisfying. In a world of single, spoiled boys who have been able to walk away from any commitment or association – lifetime brotherhood is a radical idea. Collective honor is a radical idea. Working to help people you know and care about instead of strangers is a radical idea. The.”

— Jack Donovan

26. “The collapse may be imminent and its doomsayers may be vindicated, but waiting for the world to start is not the same as starting it.”

— Jack Donovan

27. “Without strength, masculinity becomes something else – a different concept.”

— Jack Donovan

28. “Evaluating and altering the way you use the word “we” in speech, thought and writing is the simplest, yet also one of the most profound changes you can make in your everyday life to secede psychologically from the global collective and become a barbarian.”

— Jack Donovan

29. “Courage implies a risk. It implies a potential for failure or the presence of danger. Courage is measured against danger. The greater the danger, the greater the courage. Running into a burning building beats telling off your boss. Telling off your boss is more courageous than writing a really mean anonymous note. Acts without meaningful consequences require little courage.”

— Jack Donovan

30. “One of the great tragedies of modernity is the lack of opportunity for men to become what they are, to do what they were bred to do, what their bodies want to do. They could be Plato’s noble puppies, but they are chained to a stake in the ground – left to the madness of barking at shadows in the night, taunted by passing challenges left unresolved and whose outcomes will forever be unknown.”

— Jack Donovan

31. “Politics becomes even more of a magnet for self-aggrandizing sociopaths and liars than it already tends to be by nature, and men with no meaningful political power or authority waste their time and energy trying to convince complete strangers to convert to their way of thinking, even when those strangers have different group identities, different religious beliefs, and completely incompatible or opposing ideas about what is good or “best in life.”

— Jack Donovan

32. “It must be scary to stand up for beliefs also held by Eric Holder.”

— Jack Donovan

33. “Flag-wavers often say, “If you don’t like my country, then leave.” But there is nowhere to go. There is no escape.”

— Jack Donovan

34. “I’ve been a non-believer all of my life, but I’d drop to my knees and sing the praises of any righteous god who collapsed this Tower of Babel and scattered men across the Earth in a million virile, competing cultures, tribes, and gangs.”

— Jack Donovan

35. “Borders do not make a people. People make borders.”

— Jack Donovan

36. “The danger for the Noble man is in resigning himself to “wait” for the revolution. You’re alive NOW, man. Memento mori. Don’t spend your life waiting for something to happen, for some chance occurrence, for someone else to do something for you, for someone to free you, so that you can finally be who you want to be. That’s slave thinking. You might as well wait for your reward in Heaven. Do what you can, while you can.”

— Jack Donovan

37. “To be a barbarian today is to draw your own perimeter and build social networks and reciprocal relationships that are not dictated or controlled by the Empire.”

— Jack Donovan

38. “These venomous, needy souls speak of “toxic masculinity,” but who is more toxic than the person who needs to change to the whole world so that they can love themselves?”

— Jack Donovan