Violence Quotes

One lesson I learned from all of this, and that was a hard one, for all of the good I did people, it was never remembered. I was the one doing jail, not them. Apart from a small circle of close loyal friends, I was and am on my own.

~ Stephen Richards

A normal fighter in the street fights in a different way than a disciplined boxer, but a boxer is from the other world, it’s a big difference. A boxer can throw a six-inch punch. A six-inch punch can knock you clean down. I’m very wary of those boxers, I can tell you. If you get a boxer that can street fight and he mixes it together then it makes a lethal combination! I mixed boxing and street fighting in to a cocktail and when I knocked them down I kept them down by use of the boot.

~ Stephen Richards

It was much easier to explain the veil than to answer questions about the wounds.

~ Pawan Mishra

More violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction.

~ Maajid Nawaz

Never plan an act of violence. Just let it happen natural.

~ Garth Ennis

Hersey was describing for the first time the war's true legacy: a permanent condition of helpless anger and universal dread. Hiroshima was the end of the line for the archaic idea that war was something that soldiers did on battlefields, somewhere on the far side of the horizon. The great strategic breakthrough of the war had been the targeting of civilian populations with weapons of mass destruction -- so that for the first time in history everybody, soldier and civilian alike, could share equally in the horror of battle. Now the postwar world was elevating this principle, making it the organizing fact of existence. After Hiroshima, Armageddon could erupt anytime, anywhere on earth, without warning, by accident. Even as people walked heedlessly in the streets, the bombs could be spiraling down from an invisible plane passing in the stratosphere; at dinnertime in the heartland, as the local news droned on about the Middle East, the missiles could already be arching over the north pole, like the ribs of a strange new cathedral.

~ Lee Sandlin

The further from law you move, the closer to claw you come.

~ Agona Apell

In late 1985, the Reagan White House blocked the use of CDC money for education, leaving the US behind other Western nations in telling its citizens how to avoid contracting the virus. Many Americans still thought you could get AIDS from a toilet seat or a glass of water. According to one poll, the majority of Americans supported quarantining AIDS patients.This heightened awareness set off waves of anxiety across the country, which was often express through jokes (Q: What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair? A: Roll-AIDS!) and violence. Between the years 1985 and 1986, anti-gay violence increased by 42 percent in the US. Even in San Francisco, where Greyhound buses still dropped off gay men and women taking refuge from the prejudice of their hometowns, carloads of teenagers would drive through the Castro looking for targets.In December 1985, a group of teenagers, shouting “diseased faggot” and “you’re killing us all,” dragged a man named David Johnson from his car in a San Francisco parking lot. While his lover looked on in horror, the teenagers kicked and beat Johnson with their skateboards, breaking three of his ribs, bruising his kidneys, an gashing his face and neck with deep fingernail scratches.

~ Alysia Abbott

At first, we both miss a few sharp bursts of wild punches and then, BANG! I catch him with a full swing left hook and he goes down like a ferret down a hole after a rabbit. When that punch landed, I broke my hand, again, and simultaneously broke his jaw. I wonder if that is an entry into the Guinness Book of records?

~ Stephen Richards

When I got off him, I spat the blood that was swamping my mouth in to his face, I looked down at him and it really looked like he was dying… shit! The ambulance arrived in about a minute and they got an oxygen mask straight on him and I could see the life draining out of him. You see, this is the problem; we are only human and flesh and blood.

~ Stephen Richards

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.

~ Albert Camus

So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

~ Howard Zinn

But many people do not fully realize that there are terrible consequences when people becoming things. Self-image is deeply affected. The self-esteem of girls plummets as they reach adolescence partly because they cannot possibly escape the message that their bodies are objects, and imperfect objects at that. Boys learn that masculinity requires a kind of ruthlessness, even brutality. Violence becomes inevitable.

~ Jean Kilbourne

There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Emotional blackmails and psychological threats are the feces of a rotten soul.

~ Angelica Hopes

He had not joined in on the laughter or even on the beating. Violence of any sort horrified him. Nevertheless, he stood by while Mike, their leader, drove a boot down on Joe’s hand. The hideous cracking sound of breaking bones came into his mind and a helpless shudder ran through him. Joe, whose high piercing scream against the autumn skies of indifference, replayed in his memory with shrill agony. Several times, he had shouted: “He’s had enough! Let up on him!” Which earned him looks of contempt from the others. They had left the kid there, screaming in that back alley. He remembered trying to drown those screams out of his mind.

~ Jaime Allison Parker

I show how much of the wars of religion involved Catholics killing Catholics, Lutherans killing Lutherans, and Catholic-Protestant collaboration. (Page 10 The Myth of Religious Violence)

~ William Cavanaugh

Fire is often the weapon of choice for the insane.

~ Douglas Preston

As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light.

~ Aspen Matis

We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.

~ Pope Francis

Violence doesn't solve anything. Win would make a face when I said that, but the truth was, whenever I resorted to violence, it never just ended there. Violence ripples and reverberates. It echoes and really never seems to go silent.

~ Harlan Coben

A man with a rifle or a club can only be stopped by a person who defends himself with a rifle or a club. That's equality. If the United States government doesn't want you and me to have rifles, then take the rifles away from those racists. If they don't want you and me to use clubs, take the clubs away from the racists. If they don't want you and me to get violent, then stop the racists from being violent. Don't teach us non-violence!!!

~ Malcolm X

Violence isn't the answer.

~ Shannon Messenger

She decided that day to study Russian, the language of violence, terror, and absurdity. She knew she would never be bored.

~ Natalie Standiford

It isn't a coincidence that the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat happened after September 11. Gujarat is also one place where the toxic waste of the World Trade Center is being dumped right now. This waste is being dumped in Gujarat, and then taken of to Ludhiana and places like that to be recycled. I think it's quite a metaphor. The demonization of Muslims has also been given legitimacy by the world's superpower, by the emperor himself. We are at a stage where democracy - this corrupted, scandalous version of democracy - is the problem. So much of what politicians do is with an eye on elections. Wars are fought as election campaigns. In India, Muslims are killed as part of election campaigns. In 1984, after the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, the Congress Party won, hands down. We must ask ourselves very serious questions about this particular brand of democracy.

~ Arundhati Roy

All Sam Peckinpah ever did in his movies was show that getting hit on the chin doesn't sound like [makes a small popping noise]. When one grown man hits another grown man in the face, it splatters like an overripe tomato. And it's not fun getting killed. It's bloody and gory and altogether unpleasant. That's all Sam Peckinpah ever did.

~ Harry Crews

It takes abstract thinking to see how greed can lead to prosperity, but it takes wishful thinking to claim that violence can lead to charity.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Throughout the history of the Kensington Rune Stone in the twentiethcentury, memories of an ancient battle were repeatedly evoked toaddress the concerns about more recent battles. The skræling enduredas a convenient symbol of the threats posed by secularization, urbanization,and diversification. As sociologist Richard K. Fenn observes,“Any society is a reservoir of old longings and ancient hatreds. Theseneed to be understood, addressed, resolved and transcended if a societyis to have a future that is different from its past.” Furthermore, whena society does not adequately confront its past, it perpetually finds “anew target that resembles but also differs from the source of originalconflict.” If Fenn is correct, old enemies will continue to emerge inthe face of new enemies unless Minnesotans can understand, address,resolve, and transcend the state’s original sin: the unjust treatment ofthe region’s first inhabitants.

~ David M. Krueger

For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody.

~ Frederik Pohl

Science & Love have progressed either ways with growth of violence!

~ Vishwanath S J

Bonobo discipline involves being schooled in a gentler, more playful fashion.

~ Susan Block

War is a terrible, bloody thing.

~ Katlyn Charlesworth

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.

~ Courtney Summers

All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.

~ Azar Nafisi

Difficult times do not produce gentility, as if there is an angle hovering over the world of the oppressed.

~ Jonny Steinberg

There’s fear and violence under the surface. One always follows the other.

~ James W. Bodden

...The world's benefactor has no choice; he is the surgeon who wields the healing scalpel. He does not want the violence, but the reality (which he has invented) drives him to use violence, in a way, against his will. Throwing a bomb into a crowded department store thus becomes an act of revolutionary love for mankind (and, in general, to quote Lübbe again, 'his primary intention is not to throw bombs into department stores or police stations, but rather into public consciousness.')

~ Paul Watzlawick

We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber's targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the 20th century, the rate of civilian deaths rose sharply and now stands at 90 percent. In the West we solemnize the deaths of our regular troops carefully and recurrently honor the memory of the soldier who dies do his country. Yet the civilian deaths we cause are rarely mentioned, and there has been no sustained outcry in the West against them. Suicide bombing shocks us to the core; but should it be more shocking than the deaths of thousands of children in their homelands every every year because of land mines? Or collateral damage in a drone strike?

~ Karen Armstrong

Sir Arthur grimaced. He hated violence - perhaps his father ingrained that into him. But he still fought, for principle and for father's legacy. Now that legacy meant the protection of defenseless women. There were a few Persians in the way to execute that duty. He stabbed his blade into a Tatar's chest. Another one.

~ Justus A. Platt