Quotes About Brutality

The world of the Druids had been destroyed and would not be revived. But the power of Rome was so much more brutal, more inhuman, more oppressive that it would not need an invasion to get rid of it. It withered because it was so hated by the people who had to endure it. And because most of them saw no point to it any more.

By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul.

And once again sentimentality seems to be dialectically related to violence and brutality, in imagination if not in deed.

A number of the heads of the offices were slippery politicians of a low moral grade, themselves appointed under the spoils system, and anxious, directly or indirectly, to break down the merit system and to pay their own political debts by appointing their henchmen and supporters to the positions under them. Occasionally these men acted with open and naked brutality. Ordinarily they sought by cunning to evade the law.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

There were fearful consequences to the open tolerance of brutality: the depravity would "spread like an epidemic." Surprisingly quickly the like-minded and the deviant personalities come together, as is the case in Poland, in order to give full vent to their animalistic and pathological instincts. Eventually, Blaskowitz said, "only the brutal will rule.

the tender brutality of physical existence...the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts...

Israelis like to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an "enlightened" or "benign" occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation.

Don't let the fear and suspicion of the brutal and ignorant make you doubt yourself.

As Harry marveled, the Cenobite continued his brutal effort of making new adjustments to his own flesh so as to fit the Devil's suit: first a slice off his other hip, down to the red meat; then up to his arms, slicing away the flesh at the back of his triceps; and passing the knife from left hand to right and back again, cutting effortlessly with either. The area around his feet looked like the floor of a butcher's store. Cobs and slices of fatty meat were scattered everywhere.

In our modern age, cell phone technology permits us to record the constant brutality that occurs all around us; we experience not an uptick in violence but a new kind of witnessing.

Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time.

Now he worked on a new theory: There was no higher system guiding Nickel's brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people. A figment from tenth-grade science struck him: a Perpetual Misery Machine, one that operated by itself without human agency. Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It's all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life. Now, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly. The only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects, of wilful force and injustice.

Ohlmeyer saw communism for the sham that it was—a bunch of brutes who seized power in the name of the people, only to repress the very people they claimed to champion

even in the sight of their fellows, not one escaping. Their furie not thus satisfied, they cut the slayne men in peeces

A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.

An Ax was raised into the smoke filled sky while the surrounding soldiers pinned him down and stood on his hands. It took more than a dozen blows to sever each arm just below the elbows. The strangest sensation, he said, was that one minute he could feel his knuckles being ground into the asphalt by the soldier's boot and in the next he watched the man kick his arm away and he felt nothing.

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

If you believe that the natural world is good, then you must also accept its brutality.

Guns tell the truth. Guns never say, "I'm only kidding." War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere.

There was an air of indifference about them [the male guests], a calm produced by the gratification of every passion… that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one's vanity—the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.

Wilhuff had had ample time to grow accustomed to the sight, scent, and taste of blood, but he had never seen so much human blood spilled in one place.