Quotes About Violence

Let everyone see the blood,' he said. 'Don't clean it up. That's the only way people remember.'... I could see the blood inside my head. It was with me forever, whether or not I wanted to forget.

Women here in Massachusetts had been drowned and beaten and hanged, especially if they were found to have access to books other than the Bible, for the Puritans had been convinced that they alone had the ear of God.

We don't need to make a living off of other people's pain...the newspapers want violence, retribution, crime, sin.

Shoot him in the foot," Mr. Persichetti would tell Mr. Keane, years later, when Tony had already returned from the war and Jacob had drawn a bad number. "Break his legs before you let him go.")

It is our access to the truth that can enable us to prevent such people, who yearn for the order' spawned by violence, from realizing their destructive plans. Fascism will have had its day once society ceases to deny the knowledge we already possess about the production of brutality, violence, and dehumanization in childhood and minimize its dangers. Once this has happened, it won't have a chance in this society.

What is valid for the individual is also valid for the development of a wider social consciousness. Here, too, the monstrous truth regarding the causes and consequences of child abuse and the way that violence can be bred into human beings cannot be admitted to the consciousness all at once, but must proceed slowly, step by step.

It is above all the children already born that have a right to life—a right to coexistence with adults in a world in which, with or without the help of the church, violence against children has been unequivocally outlawed. Until such legislation exists, talk of the right to life remains not only a mockery of humanity but a contribution to its destruction.

Adolescents' heroic willingness to fight one another in wars and (just as life is beginning!) to die for someone else's cause may be a result of the fact that during puberty the warded-off hatred from early childhood becomes really intensified. Adolescents can divert this hatred from their parents if they are given a clear-cut enemy whom they are permitted to hate freely and with impunity.

Six years after I began to paint I wrote my first three books in three years (The Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware), in which I tried to explain the connections between denied suffering in childhood and adult violence.

El Mundo me considera un Monstruo y no tengo nada en contra de eso, aunque de paso podría decir que a los que sueltan bombas o queman ciudades o matan de hambre o asesinan a cientos de miles de personas normalmente no se los considera Monstruos sino que les llueven medallas y honores, pues solo los actos contra pocas personas se consideran malos y terribles. Lo cual no es una excusa sino una simple observación.

Mentira nenhuma, afinal, era mais violenta que as mentiras que nós contamos a nós mesmos e aí desgraçadamente temos que continuar contando para segurar aquele vômito todo no estômago, comendo a gente por dentro.

I wanted to slap Miss Priss. Slap her hard. But I didn't do it. It always been this way with me. I'll call another girl bitch before you blink, but I don't like to hit a woman. I guess it always felt like too much of a man to do it. Strange enough. Strength always seemed to rob the girl out of me, so I always take care to keep it hid.

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn't calculate my steps. I didn't have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.

For Lorenz, virgins were not a part of his world. He was skeptical of many things I said. Later, when the serology reports proved that what I had said was not a lie, that I had been a virgin, and that I was telling the truth, he could not respect me enough. I think he felt responsible, somehow. It was, after all, in his world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.

When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.

But I had made contact with a different planet from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Why should the killers of the world be the future and not us?

How peculiar it feels to speak about health care in America taking care of people's health while our government bombs the limbs off children in faraway lands. And starves and imprisons not a few of them at home. How odd that it seems not obviously known that true health care must mean, at minimum, deliberate non-harming of anyone?

I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class and grin for television over their victory, i.e. , the death of four small black girls.