Quotes About Violence

He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If

Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.

Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: "We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?" When

we live in a world of corpses, and only about some of them is there a hue and cry. True

Sir Archibald Bodkin (best known to history as the man who later would get James Joyce's novel Ulysses banned from publication in postwar England), thundered accusingly that "war will become impossible if all men were to have the view that war is wrong.

two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner's rectum. Copying

every shell fired at the Boers, Lloyd George thundered, carried away with it an old-age pension.

both sides together suffered another half a million dead and wounded just during the war's final five weeks.

On this final half day of the war, after the peace was signed, 2,738 men from both sides were killed and more than 8,000 wounded.

American gang members talk about themselves, their lives, their ambitions, their idea of fate, the role of violence and revenge, in ways that are strangely like the Greeks in the Iliad.

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten'?" He laughed again. "Racine has his moments, sure, but you can't beat Shakespeare for the really grisly stuff.

If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least . . . abstain from robbing and murdering one another.

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any constraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any restraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

the difference between a physiotherapist and a terrorist is that you might have a chance of negotiating with a terrorist." ? Adrian McKinty, The Island

By the sword you did your work, and by the sword you die.

I will speak in defense of reason: for the very child of vanity is violence.

Srinagar hunches like a wild cat: lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city's bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill . . . while the Jhelum flows under them, sometimes with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps rush by. The candles go out as travelers, unable to light up the velvet Void. What is the blesséd word? Mandelstam gives no clue. One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time.

I started tearing at my mouth. Get it out! I roared.

It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants, while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood, had met violent ends on the horns of unforeseen bison.

In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a a habit of growing worrisome in its own way.

De door alcohol opgewekte gevechten die op zaterdagavonden in provincieplaatsen uitbreken zijn voorspelbare symptomen van onze verbolgenheid over deze vrijheidsberoving. Ze herinneren ons aan de prijs die we betalen voor onze dagelijkse onderwerping aan orde en beleid - en aan de woede die stilletjes aanzwelt achter een gezagsgetrouwe en inschikkelijke façade.

I did not know this word, "lynching," but when I asked Jade Moon about it she explained, "As I understand, it refers to a custom in the American South, where white men may punish the darker peoples with impunity by hanging them from trees. I was speechless. How could such barbarity exist in a land of freedom like America? What country was this, in which I had been living all these years?

was at once appalled and impressed. Personally, he could not recall having read or heard of an instance where a human economist had resolved a disagreement with a fellow academician by ripping out the other's tendons and ligaments.