violence Quotes

“Et tu, Brute?”

“Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.”

The solution to violence in America is the acceptance of reality.

They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

“Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”

“Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”

“Emotional energy has got to go somewhere, and self-loathing is a powerful emotion. Turned inwards, it becomes our personal hells: addiction, obsession, compulsion, depression, violent relationships, illness. Projected outward it becomes our collective hells: violence, war, crime, oppression. But it’s all the same thing. Hell has many mansions too.”

“I am never proud to participate in violence, yet, I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves, that we can be ready and able to come to our own defense when and wherever needed.”

“The great end of justice is to substitute the notion of right for that of violence, and to place a legal barrier between the power of the government and the use of physical force.”

“Well, what did I think? That the victors’ chain of locked hands last night would result in some sort of universal truce in the arena? No, I never believed that. But I guess I had hoped people might show some . . . what? Restraint? Reluctance, at least. Before they jumped right into massacre mode.”

“All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire.”

“Many nations were plagued with bankruptcy, inflation, and a flood of shell-shocked war veterans. A spell of innocence and calm had been broken - an indefinable something was lost, never to be recovered. Everyone struggled to make sense of the new world and, if possible, extract meaning from the violence of the war.”

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”

“There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.”

“She talks of the pain, grief, and horror of the past four years; of learning to cope with being the wife of a man so violent and unpredictable his touch made her skin crawl and of thinking, until quite recently, that she’d finally managed to do that. And then, finally, of how my appearance had forced her to realize she hadn’t learned to cope at all.”

“People point guns at each other all the time in Ketterdam. It’s basically a handshake.”

“I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all. Yes, I played pranks and set fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people. I never hit anyone. I was never angry. I just didn’t see myself that way. My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others. I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. After that, she never raised her hand to her children again.”

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to you tell me that it’s okay for August to hit her because she’s his wife. Or that it’s not his fault because he’s insane. If he’s insane, that’s all the more reason she should stay away.”

“Nothing like being shot at a few times to make you a fast learner.”

“It’s a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would really be a gory, blood-smeared earth.”

“I must go. He was my brother!”

“It will only end when blood is spilled”

“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed, than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”

″[Mother] reared back to slap me. I saw it coming, so when she swung I grabbed her hand […] She couldn’t hit me because I had her arms, so she tried to kick me. As she did, I let go of her hands and she lost her balance and fell to the floor and she started crying, crying really hard.”

“You have very low self-esteem. You’re confrontational and tend to be aggressive, you sometimes react to confrontation with violence.”

“I scream. I see a bed. I grab the end of the bed and I lift it and I flip it and the mattress goes and I grab the simple metal frame and I lift it and I throw it down with everything everything everything and it snaps but it’s not enough so I stomp it stomp it stomp it and it snaps again again again and there are only broken bars and bolts and screws and I’m screaming and it feels good and I’m just getting started.”

“My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut.”

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour.”

“If I didn’t want the violence to remain, I had to do . . . a lot more than just say the right things and not say the wrong things.”

“While we often moved to different cadences, our nation was alive with ideals. We were in motion. Violence was everywhere but so was a conviction that we must somehow make this a better world.”

“All right, folks. Let’s finish quickly. ”

“‘Despite what your mama told you,’ he quipped, ‘violence does solve problems.’”

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture or violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. ”

“Silence creates its own violence.”

″ But he kept this knowledge of his fear thrust firmly down in him; his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness. ”

″[War] provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.”

“When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.”

″ In a culture of domination everyone is socialized to see violence as an acceptable means of social control. ”

“Violence here is always happening or just about ready to happen. I think these guys like it—they want it to be normal because that’s what they’re used to dealing with.”

“My own corruption is violent, tumultuous, enticing, and entangling. As it conceives sin, it wars within me and against me.”

“In a way we’re like a revolutionary group-repossessing society by violence. It’s inevitable. Violence is no stranger to you. You’ve killed. Many times.”

“The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence.”

“I used to be in a very revolutionary mood, but now I think that we’ll gain nothing by violence.”

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

“Very hard ethical questions are involved,” he went on. “You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State’s Peace. I hope you take all that in. I hope you are absolutely clear in your own mind about that.”

“But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.”

“Lydia’s tone had suddenly calmed down. I felt better. Her violence frightened me. She always claimed that I was the jealous one, and I was often jealous, but when I saw things working against me I simply became disgusted and withdrew. Lydia was different. She reacted. She was the Head Cheerleader at the Game of Violence.”

“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”

“I have had high times. But the best times of all were afterward, just afterward, with the gun warm in my hand, the bite of smoke in my nose, the taste of death on my tongue, my heart high in my gullet, the danger past, and then the sweat, suddenly, and the nothingness, and the sweet clean feel of being born.”

“Violence and cruelty were just a stupid person’s way of making himself felt because it was easier to use your hands to strike a blow than to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to a problem.”

“We raised our swords against each other because neither of us had the courage to raise one against him.”

“The McCrackens. The Herders of the world. Sure, our kind may look a lot like Wolves—large fangs, sharp claws, and the capacity for violence—but what sets us apart from the rest is that we represent the balance between the two. We can navigate the flock freely, with the ability to protect or disown as we see fit.”

“Over generations, love of the maji turned into fear. Fear turned into hate. Hate transformed into violence, a desire to wipe the maji away.”

“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

It is an original fairy tale using elements from Russian history and Russian folklore. Like many traditional tales it is full of cruelty, violence and sudden death.

“Sadie’s father is in the Orange Order, and her own brother has to constantly explain to others why he himself doesn’t want to join up as he is also sick of violence.”

Robert is a stranger; Mark is an intimate friend. Robert has written a letter that morning, the letter of a man in a dangerous temper. Robert is the tough customer; Mark the highly civilized gentleman. If there has been a quarrel, it is Robert who has shot Mark.

My theory is that he quarrelled violently with Mark over the girl, and killed him in sudden passion. Anything that happened after that would be self-defense.

Things swam blood before him, and he screamed aloud in his fury, lifting his victim and smashing his head upon the floor.

“I’ll mash in your face for you before you get out of here!”

“What shall I do with Albert? As certainly, Maximilian, as I now press your hand, I shall kill him before ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“If you strike that dog again, I’ll kill you,” he at last managed to say in a choking voice.

“Now, you red-eyed devil,” he said, when he had made an opening sufficient for the passage of Buck’s body.

The messenger uttered a cry of joy and clapped his hands. At this signal four soldiers of the Seraskier Kourchid suddenly appeared, and Selim fell, pierced by five blows.

“Now, sir,” continued Morrel, “in these days no one can disappear by violent means without some inquiries being made as to the cause of her disappearance, even were she not a young, beautiful, and adorable creature like Valentine.”

You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted, and ate.

“My father, Pip, he were given to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at my mother, most onmerciful. It were a’most the only hammering he did, indeed, ‘xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigor only to be equalled by the wigor with which he didn’t hammer at his anwil.”

The unemployed bystanders drew back when they saw me, and so I became aware of my sister,—lying without sense or movement on the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was turned towards the fire,—destined never to be on the Rampage again, while she was the wife of Joe.

“The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood!”

“The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain.”

“I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you to-night. I giv’ it her! I left her for dead, and if there had been a limekiln as nigh her as there is now nigh you, she shouldn’t have come to life again. But it warn’t Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was favoured, and he was bullied and beat. Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh? Now you pays for it. You done it; now you pays for it.”

“It is in my head that, if bullets mean anything, they would cast thee out.”

“Come back, or we will stone thee.”

“Good God!” he cried, “can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open... that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal and tremble; hide, all spattered in the blood... with the axe.... Good God, can it be?”