Quotes About Violence

if some shank decides he's a sissy-pants and tries to turn back, I'll make sure he does it with a broken nose and smashed privates.

Minho laughed, then raised the palm of his hand and shoved Gally in the face. Thomas half stood as he watched the Glader crash down into his chair, tipping it over backward, cracking it in two pieces. Gally sprawled across the floor, then scrambled to stand up, struggling to get his hands and feet under him. Minho stepped closer and stomped the bottom of his foot down on Gally's back, driving his body flat to the ground.

Is it your goal in life to piss me off until I cut your arteries open one by one?

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

War and good health are incompatible. There's no way we can go [eradicate diseases] into an area that is at war.

Ladies and gentlemen: War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

An act of terrorism totally outside the bounds of international law and diplomatic tradition. ... a crisis that calls for firmness and restraint.

Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man.

Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument.

The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps

All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

Poverty kills far more people than all the wars in history, more people than all the murderers in history, more than all the suicides in history, not only does structural violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together, structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence

The first lesson that tragedy teaches (and that morality plays miss) is that all violence is an attempt to achieve justice, or what the violent person perceives as justice, for himself or for whomever it is on whose behalf he is being violent [...] Thus, the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence.

I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed.

Many thinkers have recognized for a long time now that if we do not eliminate war, war will eliminate us. Preventing violence, then, is simply the necessary prerequisite for the survival of our species. It is a project of evolutionary significance.

The most potent stimulus of aggression and violence, and the one that is most reliable in eliciting this response, is not frustration per-se (as the "frustration-aggression" hypothesis had claimed), but rather, insult and humiliation. In other words, the most effective way, and often the only way, to provoke someone to become violent is to insult him.

Unequal societies are not only the most violent; they are also the least productive.

What is the mistake the criminal justice system is making? The major mistake, I believe, is the failure to differentiate between restraint and punishment; and to imagine that punishment will prevent, or deter, violence.

The criminal justice and penal systems have been operating on the basis of a huge mistake, namely, the belief that punishment will deter, prevent, or inhibit violence, when in fact it is the most powerful stimulus of violence that we have yet discovered.

Violence occurs when people see no means of undoing or preventing their own humiliation except by humiliating others; indeed, that is the underlying purpose of inflicting violence on others.

Violence, from the point of view of those who engage in it, does not intensify shame, it diminishes it and even reverses it into its opposite, namely, self-respect, and respect from others, which is why the most violent people boast for their violence rather than apologizing for it.

Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians!

Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of Communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.