Quotes About Violence

Government wars and exterminations in the twentieth century reached 262 million people killed by their own governments and 44 million people killed in wars. I fear that doesn't say much for the evolutionary process.

In the last 13 years, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when compared to our two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, have not resulted in staggering numbers of Americans killed. But the deaths of non-Americans as a consequence of our sanctions, invasions, and bombings are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. We may not be counting, but the Muslim world is. Recipients of such violence and their families have long memories.

The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.

context, spoke of the threat of a "mobocratic spirit"18 seen in an outbreak of mob violence that

Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

Where in this wide world can a person find nobility without pride, friendship without envy or beauty without vanity? Here, where grace is laced with muscle and strength by gentleness confined. He serves without servility, he has fought without enmity. There is nothing so powerful, nothing less violent; there is nothing so quick, nothing more patient.

It is very doubtful that one can implement Jesus's command to love one's enemies and kill them at the same time.

Miroslav Volf notes that "the certainty of God's just judgment at the end of history is the presupposition for the renunciation of violence in the middle of it.

If pacifism is not God's will for all Christians, then it is not His will any. On the other hand, if the one who taught us to love our enemies is the eternal Son who became flesh in the carpenter who died and rose and now reigns as Lord of the universe, then the peaceful way of nonviolence is for all who believe and obey him. Do we have the courage to summon the entire church to forsake the way of violence?

Before I die I have given myself the modest task of convincing the Christians in America that as Christians we have a problem with war. I am not expecting the vast majority of Christians to be pacifists or even just warriors. I simply want them to see that there is a profound tension between our worship of a crucified messiah and the support of war.

During the Charlottesville protests, Trump saw nuance—there was violence on "many sides," there was "blame on both sides," and there were "many fine people" among the neo-Nazis.

John W. Hinckley

War is our only recourse. There is no other remedy.

They understood that the innate emotions of humans were mutable. Anger didn't have to lead to violence, hate to cruelty, fear to oppression. There was a space for change between what words were said and what deeds were done.

While it is a truism to observe that if humans were angels, law would be unnecessary, we could equally turn the truism around, and note that if humans were devils, law would be pointless. In this sense, the law-making project always presupposes the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of humankind. Whether our view of human nature tends toward Hobbesian grimness or Rousseauian equanimity, we tend to think of law as critical to reducing brutality and violence.

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)

American society asks police officers to use violence when needed to enforce the law, but we also ask them to serve as mediators, protectors, social workers, mentors, and medics. But it's very difficult to play any one of these roles well—and it's almost impossible to be good at them all.

The distinction between war and nonwar may be arbitrary, but we want it to be sharp and clear, because many actions that are considered both immoral and illegal in peacetime are permissible—even praiseworthy—in wartime. Recall

We tell ourselves that a central project of law and political institutions is the reduction of violence, but this is mostly a fairly tale. Law and politics play a role in structuring violence, but rarely "reduce" it.

Violence is a puzzle. We all say we oppose violence and want to reduce it, but no human society gets by without it.

What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.

17% of girls have experienced a physical attack… 97% of students report regularly hearing homophobic remarks by peers… 53% hear homophobic comments by teaching staff…

Joseph Smith and the early Mormons had tried their best to murder all Indians in their path across the country, but in the end did not quite succeed. Arthur V. Watkins decided to use the power of his office to finish what the prophet had started. He didn't even have to get his hands bloody.

1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.