Quotes About Violence

The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy's teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug's gun—at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.

These supposedly better-for-women dictators were not opposed to imprisoning women or using sexual violence—gang rapes, virginity checks—to punish women who opposed them. For women who wanted more—more dignity, more public and civic influence, more room to practice their religion—the status quo had no room for them.

In government-controlled Syria, the broken land over which Bashar al-Assad presided as nominal victor, there was no sign that the regime would cease the policies of repression and violence that had provoked the original uprising. In July 2018, the government issued death certificates for sixty thousand people who had simply disappeared in government detention.

From the evolutionary perspective, revenge is retaliation that is intended either to destroy an enemy or to foster deterrence against him, as well as against third parties. This, of course, applies to non-physical and non-violent, as well as to physical and violent, action.

Revenge has probably been the most regular and prominent cause of fighting cited in anthropological accounts of pre-state societies. Violence was activated to avenge injuries to honour, property, women, and kin. If life was taken, revenge reached its peak, often leading to a vicious circle of death and counter-death.

Perpetration of serious violence and crime is in fact the most distinctive sex difference there is, cross-culturally.

Marx's projected emancipating socialist Kingdom of Freedom - freedom not only from coercion but from any sort of necessity- turned out to be totalitarian and among the most violently oppressive regimes ever.

All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.

In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality.

I had come to a conclusion: our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it. It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key.

This era is overwhelmed by violence both in rhetoric and reality, communicating not through inclusion but elimination.

demonstrators were attacked by the government-backed vigilantes.

There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins—I'm sorry, I feel your pain?

If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.

If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works

I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manfuacturer's lobby.

just as MBZ had predicted, in the small island nation of Bahrain, huge, mostly Shiite demonstrations against the government of King Hamad bin Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa were taking place in the capital city of Manama, and the Bahraini government responded with force, killing scores of protesters and injuring hundreds more.

I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better.

centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people, and that who controlled legally sanctioned violence, how it was wielded and against whom, still mattered in the recesses of our tribal minds much more than we cared to admit.

the White House's interest in maintaining a sizable troop presence in Iraq was about more than a simple desire to ensure stability and reduce violence. It was also about preventing Iran from taking further advantage of the mess we'd made.

the only clear, defining thing about being a man, about being masculine, is excelling in sports and sexual conquest— BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: And violence.

War is not nice.

Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.