Violence Quotes - Page 18

If I interrupted violence, by all means I'll step back. Always nice to see bloodshed first thing in the a.m.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Violence isn't a Democrat or Republican problem. It's an American problem, requiring an American solution.

Covetousness gives birth to violence, while violence gives birth to oppression.

All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation

I was not frightened as they were, for the very violence of his threats showed how weak he was.

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

Go that way, past the viaduct, and the wops will jump you, or chase you into Jew town...Polacks would stomp on you...Micks will shower you with Irish confetti from the brickyards.

A society that decides its controversial issues by ballots does better than one that uses bullets – which, after all, is no more likely to lead to the right conclusion than voting.

You can’t separate desperate politicians from violence and trouble.

I was so incensed that I was oblivious to all as I ran over broken glass, holding a five-foot weightlifting bar. The glass tore the soles of my feet as I chased the gang’s car up the street. I remember breathing heavily as I cursed failing to catch my enemies.

I can only imagine that future generations will consider us to have been barbaric for our intolerance of differences.

If there is some corner of the world which has remained peaceful, but with a peace based on injustices the peace of a swamp with rotten matter fermenting in its depths - we may be sure that that peace is false. Violence attracts violence. Let us repeat fearlessly and ceaselessly: injustices bring revolt, either from the oppressed or from the young, determined to fight for a more just and more human world.

Don’t you understand that freedom depends upon the continuing possibility of rebel violence. When violence becomes unthinkable, freedom dies…

Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance.

Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence ... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor...

Isn't it amazing that, historically, the "Prince of Peace" has most often been introduced to new cultures through extreme violence? European and American colonialists bring this disparity to light in a way that makes me wish that forced conversion didn't work so extraordinarily well.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

Peace in patriarchy is war against women.

It was the seventh of November, 1918. The war was finally over. Maybe it would be declared a holiday and named War's End Day or something equally hopeful and wrong. Wars would break out again. Violence was part of human nature as much as love and generosity.

Generally speaking, by the way, that is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts.

Remember, I'm the only person her who's paid to be nice to you. But not too nice. Give me any lip and I'll break your face. OK?

To be an American is to be accosted by bigotry and enmity for the rights that you were told to appreciate.

And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.

Okay then, we’re set” he thought. “Come and get it”. The enemy, his enemy, were walking into the classic football ambush and they didn’t have a fucking clue.

You look at the history of any sentient species and what do you find but tableaux of violence and slaughter. It’s finger-painted on the ceilings of caves and engraved into the walls of temples.

The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?

Every day in America is a day with a shooting.

What I'd like to read is a scientific review, by a scientific psychologist--if any exists--of 'A Scientific Man and the Bible'. By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil...

Maxim 37: There is no "overkill." There is only "open fire" and "reload."-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.

The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.

At age 13, I was violently mugged at a busy train station. There were dozens of onlookers, but none of them lent a hand ... That was a defining point in that stage of my life. After that, I could never tell myself that it was someone else's problem, or let a situation pass me by if I felt something had to be done. I knew from experience that all too often, no one else would act.

The notion that we've made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat of such violent force behind it, all law would be meaningless. I prefer stories that remind us of that. At its core, history is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun.

Every time there was conquest, it brought trade, new ideas, and inventions. They made civilization evolve to new heights. Humans soar on the wings of our violent nature. There's no other way.

Tribalism is an addiction that is driven by false beliefs that need to be reflected back to be perceived as true.

Education about gender and peace is important. Educational strategies to promote peace must consider all relations of dominance.

Like two old philosophers, Ashvin and James spoke of the ruin of their lives, their unfulfilled needs, their unanswered prayers and ultimately they were seduced by the phantom call to death by suicide its science, its poetry, its violence, its art.

Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.

Her eyes widen and she shoves me back and then there's a space between us, enough to paralyze me with all of the things I could do to her next. I could raise my hand and hit her in the face or bring my knee into her stomach, take a fistful of her hair and rip it out of her skull. You don't get to do this when you're a girl, so when the opportunity for violence finally presents itself, I want all of it at once.

Two years before, when the riots started, the media had had a field day, but now people discussed them less and less. ... ...in fact the media's attitude had changed over the last few months. No one talked about violence in the banlieues or race riots anymore. That was all passed over in silence.

Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.

It was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly.

Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence?I try to smile. What's the difference, really.

The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd.

Government is a gun that shoots money at your enemy and blows up in your face.

If the world is unjust, get drunk, wave a sword, then cut off heads.

War is when people kill one another, right? Why would they do that?

Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)

Abortion should be listed as a weapon of mass destruction against the voiceless.

The scenario where the sprawling anti-hero gets his comeuppance and the champion walks off into the sunset with his arm around the prize, usually a woman, is a pleasing one. This media personification of what a hero is all about used to be the common norm. Examining past events can confirm this convoluted outlook that sees the baddie being portrayed as some sort of evil manifestation sent to cause havoc by any means possible.

When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it. If we really want to escape this war, we have to stop bringing it with us.

In a fight between a shifter and a witch, the shifter would often win—but only if they could keep the witch from speaking, usually by severing the throat or tearing out the tongue. If the witch was powerful enough, and quick enough, physical size didn't matter. Catherine had heard of the horrible ways the witches could kill their victims. Cooking them alive from the inside out, restricting oxygen flow through the nasal and oral passages by creating a vacuum, drowning them with vapor pulled from the very air.It made fights between shifters look almost humane by comparison.