Violence Quotes

Revolution does have to be violent precisely because the Pharaoh won't let you go. If the Pharaoh would let you go, the revolution won't have to be violent.

~ Michael Hardt

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.

~ Barbara Deming

It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks.

~ James Jones

Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.

~ Maximilien De Robespierre

No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.

~ Jack Henry Abbott

You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body.

~ Greg X. Graves

In the preface of The Rifles Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing. Barnabas PiryuaqWell, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created. Jan Welzi 1933.

~ William T. Vollmann

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22

~ Thomas Merton

Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport 'did more harm than good,' which I remember thinking was (a) euphemistic and (b) a slipshod expression unworthy of a professor of English.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity – its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.

~ Tobias Wolff

In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.

~ David Graeber

Maxim 12: A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

~ Howard Tayler

The germ of creation lies in violence.

~ Rudolfo Anaya

The spirit of the law is the least of the things we're prepared to violate.

~ Howard Tayler

If a violent person wishes to attack us, let us send him a gentle phrase as this will defuse his violence.

~ Samael Aun Weor

Air traffic control is going to have a steamy old fit on your dime, boy.They can get in line behind the police, the people whose cars we trashed, the Empire of Ob'enn, the Partnership Collective, and the Wormgate Corporation. Oh, and I think maybe some dark matter beasties from Andromeda.You think maybe?-General Tagon & Captain Andreyasn

~ Howard Tayler

Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a pathology except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.

~ Steven Pinker

When I find the guy who torched that forest, I'm going to eat him. And I'm only going to half-cook him first.-Sergeant Schlock

~ Howard Tayler

I hate and fear violence myself, have always avoided barroom brawls, and tho' I'm a bit of a gun-nut, and a member of the NRA, I never shoot at anything but beer cans and mule deer. (In season.) And seldom hit either, except by accident.

~ Edward Abbey

The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism.

~ Graham Greene

Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.

~ Richard Price

Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.

~ Edmund Morris

You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you’ve hurt them, marked them, they’re even more sick and ugly, aren’t they? And they’re afraid and cringing too. Oh, I know this isn’t very pleasant, but you did ask.”“Go on” he said.“So you’ve got a frightened, stupid, even disabled person, silenced, made ugly, and what can you do with someone like that, someone who’s unworthy of being treated well? You treat them badly because that’s what they deserve. One thinks of poor little kids that no one love because they’re dirty, sovered in snot and shit, and always screaming. So you beat them because they’re hateful, they’re low, they’re sub-human. That’s all they’re good for, being hit, being reduced even further.

~ Ruth Rendell

What deep violence does the mind invent / As polar opposite to love. (In 'Hat Love').

~ Tony Williams

I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then.

~ Orson Scott Card

Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dumfermline lost at home(p. 83-84)

~ John Burnside

Let them have guns' is as much a solution to mass murder and gun violence as 'Let them have drugs' is a solution to drug addiction.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Feet away, Professor Dema stood, carrying a large gunlike weapon with both her hands and a snarl on her lips. This was not the way final exams were supposed to go.

~ Nnedi Okorafor

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.

~ Adam Burch

In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.

~ Mohsin Hamid

...a freeze response (dissociation, collapse, numbing, paralysis, deadness) during the incident that threatened your life or limb. Sometimes it's difficult for people to understand that this is really survival response...

~ Babette Rothschild

Commitment to nonviolence must not be based on patient acquiescence in intolerable conditions. Rather, it stems from a deeper knowledge of the self-defeating, self-corrupting effect of lapses into violence.

~ David T. Dellinger

Violent love eats up what it does love, and it is mere appetite. I scribbled on the bottom of this before sending it back: I would sooner cut my own flesh than do you a hurt. You should not have tried to get between us! But only come to see me, and another time I will stand and let me beat to a mummy.

~ Maria Mccann

Saying both sides participated in violence doesn't mean both sides are equally ideologically wrong, you know.

~ T.j. Kirk

It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.

~ Malcom X

Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.

~ Steven Pinker

Heads up lads!” someone shouted. “Here we go!”More missiles, this time not just bottles, but coins as well. And then from the other side of the cordon, a roar went up. Bellowing across the road toward them. Billy watched as the Manchester lads poured forward, desperately trying to force a way through the massed ranks of the police only to be driven back by batons and gloved fists. Another salvo of bottles came flying across, trying to provoke a reaction. But the West Ham lads merely stood and laughed. They didn’t need to respond. The point had been made, the result earned. Billy was happy. Very happy.

~ Dougie Brimson

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.

~ Dougie Brimson

Don't you ever think,' he asked cautiously, 'that it would be better to be a bully than to be bullied? At least that way no one could ever hurt you.' Katarina turned to him in amazement. 'No,' she said definitively, shaking her head. 'No Pieter, I never think that, not for a moment.

~ John Boyne