Violence Quotes

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

~ Samuel B. Southwell

You hardly asked if I was okay the entire time we were together.” (Jessie)“Okay? You wanted me to ask you if you were okay? Jessie, I saw you! How could I think for one second you were okay? Do you think it’s normal for me to watch a girl being raped from the roof? But I was there, loaded down with enough guns to do some serious damage. And what did I do about it? Nothing. Because I could do nothing, because my sole goal was to get you safely out of there. So I sat and watched it… for hours. I let them do that to you. I heard you. I saw you. And eventually, I had to turn away. I couldn’t watch it. It was that bad. I know why you’re not okay. I don’t have to ask why.” (Will)

~ Leanne Davis

It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of “religious violence,” we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence.

~ Jack David Eller

Here was the love and violence in the hearts of men, all for their women

~ Hugh Howey

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Why fight to the death when we can love eachother to death?

~ Sigurd Bache Hungnes

The poker fell from my trembling hands as my entire body shook with reaction. I fell to my knees, pressed my hands to my face and began to sob. What had I done?

~ A.b. Shepherd

When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

I shook my head. I'm good, Nicky helped.Nicky looked at Edward. She's having one of those what-if-killing-feels-really-good, doesn't-that-make-me-a-bad-person moments. Edward nodded as if that made perfect sense. Then it feels good. We can't really control what flips our switch; don't judge it, Anita, and just accept it.I wanted to argue, but it would have been beyond stupid to argue with the two sociopaths in my life. Why do I have moral quandary questions with the two of you?Because you don't really have moral quandaries about violence, Anita, but you're afraid of being judged for enjoying it, so you only bring it to the two people in your life who won't judge you. I wanted to argue with Edward, but I couldn't. Well, fuck.

~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.

~ Simon Van Booy

Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind's extreme dissociation is that each ego state is totally without knowledge of the other. Because of this, the researchers for the CIA and the Department of Defense believed they could take a personality, train him or her to be a killer and no other ego stares would be aware of the violence that was taking place. The personality running the body would be genuinely unaware of the deaths another personality was causing. Even torture could not expose the with, because the personality experiencing the torture would have no awareness of the information being sought. Earlier, such knowledge was gained from therapists working with adults who had multiple personalities. The earliest pioneers in the field, such as Dr. Ralph Alison, a psychiatrist then living in Santa Cruz, California, were helping victims of severe early childhood trauma. Because there were no protocols for treatment, the pioneers made careful notes, publishing their discoveries so other therapists would understand how to help these rare cases. By 1965, the information was fairly extensive, including the knowledge that only unusually intelligent children become multiple personalities and that sexual trauma endured by a restrained child under the age of seven is the most common way to induce hysteric dissociation.

~ Lynn Hersha

One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.

~ Jacob Appelbaum

Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.

~ Aberjhani

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.

~ Anthony Burgess

One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn’t done anything wrong, wasn’t even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn’t stop. And when I finally did stop, I’d expended all this energy and frustration, and I’m thinking what in God’s sweet name did I do.

~ Gail A. Eisnitz

If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.

~ J.d. Salinger

Violence is avoided, when we sit down with others, and discuss issues, and work together for solutions.

~ Ellen J. Barrier

Where a person has no control, he will turn to violence; either to attain control, or as an alternative to it.

~ Charlie Herrick

From their perspective, however, torture might make a sort of cockeyed sense if it was ritualistic, part of a ceremony that this fraternity of the demented required of themselves when they murdered one of their own.

~ Dean Koontz

What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and those below cowered and, if they were not quick enough, were spattered in blood. Then came the jolt, as of a fall, and I saw the leg was caught in an ungainly way in the smaller branches of a mutamba tree, the foot hooked, long like that infamous fruit.

~ Tsitsi Dangarembga

The absolute defining moment of my life was the day the drug deal went bad. It started out just like any other day, at least for the girlfriend of a dealer. However, this time, it went bad. Really bad.

~ Valerie Fries Wade

...so much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty, and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating and destructive effect upon society than the others.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

When my trust was suspended from the fragile thread of justice and in the whole city they were chopping up my heart's lanterns when they would blindfold me with the dark handkerchief of Law and from my anxious temples of desire fountains of blood would squirt out when my life had become nothing nothing but the tic-tac of a clock, I discovered I must must must love, insanely.

~ فروغ فرخزاد

Clearly there are common sense things we can do to help children to have better lives and keep them from becoming so despondent that their only perceived solution is to kill themselves or others. How oblivious do we have to be to the inner turmoil of our own children to not see what they're going through, and then suggest when they completely snap with homicidal violence, it must've been the video games?

~ Edward M. Wolfe

Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued violence, so the army is present. There would be no contradiction in that, if terror reigned everywhere in the world, but the colonizer enjoys, in the mother country, democratic rights that the colonialist system refuses to the colonized native. In fact, the colonialist system favors population growth to reduce the cost of labor, and it forbids assimilation of the natives, whose numerical superiority, if they had voting rights, would shatter the system. Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition. Racism is ingrained in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonialist methods of production and exchange. Political and social regulations reinforce one another. Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is abandoned without protection to inhuman forces - brought in with the colonialist praxis, engendered every moment by the colonialist apparatus, and sustained by relations of production that define two sorts of individuals - one for whom privilege and humanity are one, who becomes a human being through exercising his rights; and the other, for whom a denial of rights sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in general, 'subhumanity.

~ Albert Memmi

Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?

~ Abbie Hoffman

Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.

~ Rudolf Rocker

For the Wife Beater's WifeWith blue irises her face is blossomed. BlueCircling to yellow, circling to brown on her cheeks.The long bone of her jaw untrackedShe hides in our kitchen.He sleeps it off next door.Her chicken legs tucked under herShe's frantic with lies, animatedBefore the swirling smoke.On her cigarette she leaves red prints, redLike a cut on the white cup.Like a skin she pulls her sweater around her.She's cold,She brings the cold in with her.In our kitchen she hides.He sleeps it off next door, his greatBelly heaving with booze.Again and again she tells the storyAs if the details ever changed,As if blows to the face were somehowDifferent beating to beating.We reach for her but can't help.She retreats into her cold love of himAnd looks across the table at usAs if across a sea.Next door he claws out of sleep.She says she thinks she'll do somethingAfter all, with her hair tonight.

~ Bruce Weigl

We are all artificial and have been unnaturally changed by violence and unwholesome conditioning.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Modern consumer life is a form of extreme passive violence against all people.

~ Bryant Mcgill

When the battle is over, the winners find it very hard not to pursue their violence. If you are strong enough to hold violence, you are strong enough to hold true to your pact. Then you have more moral fiber than most adults. Free will is one of the pillars of being human.

~ Alan Mccluskey

A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watcha Christ go up in flames, smiling,as if he were a hookedfish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned.His charred bodygives off light--a haloburns out of him. His face is scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip,another with his armslung over the shoulder of a friend,as if this moment were large enoughto hold affection.

~ Toi Derricotte

There just seems to be too much violence everywhere, even the news can't help break now and then on TV

~ Nikhil Sharda

One of these days I'm gonna beat him in the face with the butt of my service revolver until an eyeball pops out. These are the thoughts that keep me happy.

~ John Layman

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

~ Erik Christian Haugaard

Allah-U-Akbar (God is great) is the most frightening word, because it always reminds me that someone is committing crime;specifically murder.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.

~ Mark Lawrence

GUNS ARE NOT THE ISSUE. WE ARE.

~ Aaron B. Powell

You don't get it boy... this isn't a mudhole... its an operating table. (KRAKKKKK) And I'm the surgeon.

~ Frank Miller

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: I feed on your energy.

~ Frank Herbert