Quotes from James Gilligan

The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps

All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling,' for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante's Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice---absolute coldness.

Poverty kills far more people than all the wars in history, more people than all the murderers in history, more than all the suicides in history, not only does structural violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together, structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence

The first lesson that tragedy teaches (and that morality plays miss) is that all violence is an attempt to achieve justice, or what the violent person perceives as justice, for himself or for whomever it is on whose behalf he is being violent [...] Thus, the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence.

I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed.

Many thinkers have recognized for a long time now that if we do not eliminate war, war will eliminate us. Preventing violence, then, is simply the necessary prerequisite for the survival of our species. It is a project of evolutionary significance.

The most potent stimulus of aggression and violence, and the one that is most reliable in eliciting this response, is not frustration per-se (as the "frustration-aggression" hypothesis had claimed), but rather, insult and humiliation. In other words, the most effective way, and often the only way, to provoke someone to become violent is to insult him.

Unequal societies are not only the most violent; they are also the least productive.

What is the mistake the criminal justice system is making? The major mistake, I believe, is the failure to differentiate between restraint and punishment; and to imagine that punishment will prevent, or deter, violence.

The criminal justice and penal systems have been operating on the basis of a huge mistake, namely, the belief that punishment will deter, prevent, or inhibit violence, when in fact it is the most powerful stimulus of violence that we have yet discovered.

Violence occurs when people see no means of undoing or preventing their own humiliation except by humiliating others; indeed, that is the underlying purpose of inflicting violence on others.

when unemployment is high, inequality rises. And when unemployment is low, inequality tends to fall.

Violence, from the point of view of those who engage in it, does not intensify shame, it diminishes it and even reverses it into its opposite, namely, self-respect, and respect from others, which is why the most violent people boast for their violence rather than apologizing for it.