Girl, you’re going to be all right. You haven’t forgotten the essentials. You know about defending yourself. All you have to do now is remember … sometimes you have to defend yourself from yourself.

Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive.

The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words.

Any student of mine must be able to defend his ideas against an attack. No matter how you spend your life, your wit will defend you more often than a sword. Keep it sharp!

I am convinced of the necessity to take an effective measure of self defense.

Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.

Great way to fight a war - be prepared to defend yourself for winning.

So long as a man knows the meaning of fear, he will need the ways and means to defend himself against that fear.

You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.

Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words.’ ‘Passive.’ ‘Of a sort, yes. It is more a matter of warning off potential adversaries. In effect, you are saying: Be careful how close you tread. You cannot hurt me, but if I am pushed hard enough, I will wound you. In some things you must never yield, but these things are not eternally changeless or explicitly inflexible; rather, they are yours to decide upon, yours to reshape if you deem it prudent. They are immune to the pressure of others, but not indifferent to their arguments. Weigh and gauge at all times, and decide for yourself value and worth. But when you sense that a line has been crossed by the other person, when you sense that what is under attack is, in fact, your self-esteem, then gird yourself and stand firm.

In retrospect, I still cannot find an alternative, nor do I know of any method, place, person, religious practice (that I would be sure of), drug, or anything else in my fund of knowledge, experience, and information that would absolutely guarantee protection against whatever attacked me. However, there must be something other than the pure "fighting back" in self-defense, even if you don't know what you are fighting. It was the same defense mechanism you would use if you were attacked by an animal at night in the jungle. You don't stop to find a way to fight in the middle of the fight. You don't stop to find out what attacked you. You fight to save yourself, with what you have now, the moment the animal attacks. You fight desperately, not thinking at the time how to fight, why you fight, whom you fight. You have been attacked; the unprovoked attack in itself seems to indicate to you that whatever is attacking you is not good, or else it would not attack you in this manner.

Sometimes I wonder,” I said, “if people who are going to tell the truth shouldn’t make sure first that they can defend themselves.

We are all trying to defend ourselves against how we imagine other people are going to judge us.

They teach you how to resist the enemy, how to protect your mind and spirit. They don’t teach you how to resist your own people, especially people who think they’re trying to “help” you see “the truth.”