Quotes About Violence

But in 2014, Eisner, in consultation with the World Health Organization, proposed a goal of reducing the rate of global homicide by 50 percent within thirty years.15

homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide.

between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, "War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance.

The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.

The amount of violence in a society is more closely related to its inequality than to its poverty.

Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.

raped, or killed, and it's hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning

One doesn't have to invoke dominance to explain why Genghis Khan inseminated so many women that his Y chromosome is common in Central Asia today; it's enough to observe that he killed the women's fathers and husbands.

That tells us that the most damaging kinds of lethal violence (at least from 1820 to 1952) were murders and world wars; all the other kinds of quarrels killed far fewer people.

So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war.

In royal service, soldiers and sailors were often expected to provide for themselves by preying on the civilian population: commandeering, raping, looting, taking prizes. When demobilized, they commonly continued the same practices, but without the same royal protection; demobilized ships became pirate vessels, demobilized troops bandits.

One [dogma] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.

Manuel Eisner has calculated that between 600 and 1800 CE, about one in eight European monarchs was murdered in office, mostly by noblemen, and that a third of the killers took over the throne.

Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.

Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and Plumpy'nut, can decrease them.

Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws....

So you're saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take care of itself. Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If

It's not immediately obvious why, out of all the weapons of war, poison gas was singled out as uniquely abominable—as so uncivilized that even the Nazis kept it off the battlefield.

It's highly unpleasant to be gassed, but then it's just as unpleasant to be perforated or shredded by pieces of metal.

When I surveyed perceptions of violence in an Internet questionnaire, people guessed that 20th-century England was about 14 percent more violent than 14th-century England. In fact it was 95 percent less violent.

Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.

Scandinavians needed a couple of additional centuries before they thought the better of killing each other, and Italians didn't get serious about it until the 19th century. But by the 20th century the annual homicide rate of every Western European country had fallen into a narrow band centered on 1 per 100,000.