Quotes About Violence

Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the "dark beauty of violence," and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.

The basic aim of a nation at war is establishing an image of the enemy in order to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from the act of murder. —Glenn Gray The Warriors

those who experienced the "Thank God it wasn't me" response. Having this thought race through your mind upon seeing violent death is arguably one of the deepest, darkest, most shameful of all human responses. However, when you tell people that it is a normal thought, it is as if a huge weight has been lifted, and their sense of shame no longer has power to hurt them.

Per capita aggravated assaults in the U.S. increased almost sevenfold between 1957 and 1993.

the rate at which we are trying to kill or seriously injure each other, might be at the highest levels in peacetime history.

when soldiers were left to their own devices, the vast majority of them, on all sides, could not kill.

Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back.

Mental violence, whether acted out or not, still releases bile and other gastric juices, and extra adrenaline pumps through the body. The effect of our thoughts on our health remains a major unexplored territory in medicine.

She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had the capacity for violence within her, residing beside her heart.

Dialogue with an AK47 always ends the same way. The AK47 is always right.

in 2018, 60 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States were perpetrated against Jews (by contrast 18.6 percent targeted Muslims).

Reagan's regime was one of murder, brutality, and violence, which devastated a number of countries and probably left two hundred thousand people dead in Latin America, with hundreds of thousand of orphans and widows.

The Democrats' response against open education for black youth sometimes went beyond words to acts of violence – as when they burned down eight schools in Memphis in which black youth were being taught.

The sex slaves will have to learn to comply happily with whatever sexual act a client requests. The liberal application of violence early on will crack the resistance they will inevitably mount. If a client ever complains that the sex slave was less than accommodating, swift and brutal punishment will be meted out.

From Jewish terrorism against Arabs it is a short step to Jewish terrorism against Jews.

The fire was silent, the little houses collapsing into the flames without complaint, flocks of sparks rising to the sky. At a distance it seemed beautiful, and I thought it was strange that powerful violence is often so pleasing to the eye...

This wasn't the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn't.

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.

The notion that we've made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat of such violent force behind it, all law would be meaningless. I prefer stories that remind us of that. At its core, history is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun.

Now all the gang's dead except for me and Russell.

Respect for everyone he met. The preference of service over power. The rejection of violence. Israel—its Law and worship—as the primal source of meaning.

When U.S. prisoners were killed, it was "murder in flagrant disregard of the Geneva Conventions." But when Americans murdered Others, "they had it coming to them.

As the last stage of their training, we made them bayonet a living human

Wherever farming took root, violence emerged as a more important feature of social life.