George Lakey has written:

When I encountered Quakerism for the first time as a young man, I was struck by the sheer boldness of early Friends in following the Light. I tried to imagine, for example, an argument between a Quaker who had decided to take his family to farm in the new colony of Pennsylvania and his non-Friend neighbor:

But surely you're not going to that wild place without a gun? The savages will kill you! Even if you're willing to risk that possibility for yourself, will you let your scruples get your family slaughtered?

With historical hindsight, we now know that the nonviolent Quakers were the safest people on the frontier. It turned out that they were very practical idealists. At the time, however, they must have been amazingly brave--or faithful to their calling. ... Given the self-defeating character of massive violent retaliation, creating a nonviolent alternative does not seem to me as a big a risk as even those early Quakers took coming to Pennsylvania.

George Lakey February 2002 Friends Journal