Quotes About Violence

First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.

Religion stalks across the face of human history, knee-deep in the blood of innocents, clasping its red hands in hymns of praise to an approving God.

There is no religion in fact that I know that encourages or propagates violence in that its adherents should carry out.

The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.

What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.

The Christian religion begins with a dream and ends with a murder.

It seemed there was always a close correlation between true believers and high body counts.

Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.

Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honor, false glory, and false religion?

I don't believe a religion affords any protection if they are connected to any kind of terror.

To benefit by others' killing and to delude oneself into the belief that one is being very religions and nonviolent is sheer self-deception.

Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

ISIS goes after any group that deviates from its extreme ideology, dissident Muslims, for example, or the Yazidis who practice an ancient religion distinct from both Islam and Christianity.

Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.

Religion is the worst enemy of mankind. No single war in the history of humanity has killed as many people as religion has.

No-one wants to see violence of any kind on our streets, certainly not any violence that's justified by extreme nationalist ideas or that targets people because of their religion.

I don't know any religion that promotes violence. It is the adherents of whatever religion.

It's not a weapon, [governments] don't kill, they don't conduct massacres, although massacres have been committed and many people were killed, but they stifle religion, they're afraid probably.

It's important to understand that violent Islam is only one face of violent religion.

How can a God who said, "Love your enemies" spend so much time killing His own?

How you can argue with those who whip, stone and murder people because they wanted to live their life?

It's rather simple. God deliver us from people who know so little that they will kill for what little they know.

I show how much of the wars of religion involved Catholics killing Catholics, Lutherans killing Lutherans, and Catholic-Protestant collaboration. (Page 10 The Myth of Religious Violence)