Quotes About Violence

Markov nodded and the steel fingers tightened into my shoulders like pliers. Alexei backhanded me with the Glock and a starburst of pain erupted from my other ear. Some days suck. Some days you shouldn't even get out of bed. I said, "Who is Clark Hewitt and why is he so important?

Good-bye, Richard." So much for civil discourse. So much for modern men discussing a modern problem in an enlightened manner. I was thinking that it might be fun to beat him to death.

I asked Pike, "Are you afraid?" He shook his head. "Would you be afraid at midnight if we were alone?" He walked a moment. "I have the capacity for great violence.

Bobby's cheek was swollen and beginning to color but he still managed a grin. Probably because he had a Ruger .380 automatic in his left hand instead of a nightstick. He aimed it at me and said, "Here's where I put the fuck on you, asshole." That Bobby. What a way with words.

Of course, there is often nothing worse than war and violent death. But a truism that bears repeating is that peace, as a primary goal, is dangerous because it implies that you will sacrifice any principle for the sake of it.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood, restless harbingers of violence and bloodshed, knowing no other path....

Lift that scimitar against me, you Hyrkanian pig and I'll gut you where you stand!

You're praying, they're praying, and God, oddly enough, will come down on the side of the one with the most guns and most willing to use them. God always does.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

I wouldn't care to shoot my own townsmen over a difference of opinion about politics. Keep 'em yourself if you think you need 'em; but I suggest you'll be better off to put 'em away where you can't get at 'em. The trouble with a pistol is that if you show it, you've got to use it, and once you use it you've committed yourself.

noisy man is listened to first, and then the quiet man; and since wars are noisy and violent, it may take long for the ability of quiet men to be recognized, or for their voices to be heard above the bellowing of incompetents.

Nobody has any rights unless they've got a machine gun.

Most Americans don't know that military coups swept over half the country, with the acquiescence of the federal government. But that is what happened. The legitimate governments of southern states and cities were overthrown by force, by white supremacist paramilitary organizations. Black people and Republicans were disenfranchised and massacred. They call it the Redemption of the South, and what it means is we turn away from the idea of equality.

As people begin to feel unsafe, they start down one of two unhealthy paths. They move either to silence (withholding meaning from the pool) or to violence (trying to force meaning in the pool).

He couldn't die by degrees in a life like that, didn't think he could do it even for a few days, a revulsion that probably sprang from the same part of his character as the violence he'd come to live by.

intellectuals have grown too comfortable with the achievements of the European Enlightenment and complacent with the beliefs that religious intolerance, violence, and wars are things of the past, and that religiously motivated violence or subjugation can be committed only by "others" against the West but not by the West against the other.

It is not only violent terrorists who induce fear as a means of communication. Intellectual terrorists are equally vile. Intellectual terrorists are emotional extortionists. These terrorists, who are often racists, sexists, classists, or religious bigots, employ the language of fear. They generalize and essentialize a people, reducing them to a phenomenon. They incite fear and terror toward their victims and force the victims into a horrified silence.

Blood is a powerful thing

The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word 'senseless' springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.

She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and sometimes not.

Where I come from, one wrong look, one improper word, and blood is spilled. Where I come from, a woman's face is her husband's business only.

war. Or, rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain. The names changed, as did the faces, and I spit on them equally for all the petty feuds, the snipers, the land mines, bombing raids, the rockets, the looting and raping and killing.