Quotes About Violence

We had a good scare in our town when they broke out, because we were afraid pogroms would come next.

Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

Aber wenn das menschliche Schuldgefühl auf die Tötung des Urvaters zurückgeht, das war doch ein Fall von 'Reue', und damals soll der Voraussetzung nach Gewissen und Schuldgefühl vor der Tat nicht bestanden haben? Woher kam in diesem Fall die Reue?

In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren't often fists.

me parece que gran parte de la ira que fue el detonante de la violencia revolucionaria se originó en la hostilidad hacia la modernización, más que en la impaciencia provocada por la rapidez de sus avances.

On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanely butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics; her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.

You can't win because of the guns, said Adam with a sigh. Machine guns, mortars, field guns, howitzers: it doesn't matter how much courage soldiers have, how much will; flesh and blood can't pass through bullets and shells, or at least not in sufficient numbers to have any effect. The guns win in the end and they always will. Not us, not the Germans - the guns.

In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.

All oppression creates a state of war.

Je sens en moi quelque chose de trouble qui me fait peur, une violence qui m'épuise. Mais j'accepte la grande aventure d'être moi.

No existe muerte natural: nada de lo que sucede al hombre es natural puesto que su sola presencia cuestiona al mundo. Todos los hombres son mortales: pero para todos los hombres la muerte es un accidente y, aunque la concozca y la acepte, es una violencia indebida.

That is why Saint-Just, who believed in the individual and who knew that all authority is violence, said with somber lucidity, "No one governs innocently.

Lynching is an absolute evil; it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation of a struggle of races which has to disappear;

Time's violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

Contact with the sword causes the same defilement whether it be through the hilt or the point.

A gyilkosság bosszú azért, hogy halandók vagyunk.

But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus, insisted John Pollikop... You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners.

You see, we don't like murder as a way of argument—that's what really marks the Liberal!

and no less than fifty-nine disloyal Red students have received their just deserts by being beaten up so severely that never again will they raise in this free country the bloodstained banner of anarchism!

He was in that most blissful condition to which a powerful young man can attain—unrighteous violence in a righteous cause.

By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these.

it reels under a wild storm of blood, wave after wave battering Thebes.

That all our gathered spoil was reaved and slaughtered, Flocks, herds, and herdmen, by some human hand