Quotes About Violence

its cold immensity mocking us as we lunged away into the dark curvaceous violence of the sea.

Such killings were part of the natural order of things, an inevitable consequence of belonging to a royal household.

ABSINTHE – Extra-violent poison: one glass and you are dead. Journalists drink it while writing their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouins.

Military men are the scourges of the world.

March 20th. It is done. He was guillotined this morning. He made a good end, very good. It gave me infinite pleasure. How sweet it is to see a man's head cut off! The blood spurted out like a wave, like a wave. Oh, if I could, I would have liked to have bathed in it! What intoxicating ecstasy to crouch below it, to receive it in my hair and on my face, and rise up all crimson, all crimson! Ah, if people knew!

For the same thing happens whenever the established order of things is upset, when security no longer exists, when all those rights usually protected by the law of man or of Nature are at the mercy of unreasoning, savage force.

War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.

The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world.

You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist. [In an open letter to Upton Sinclair, printed in The American Mercury, June 1936]

Ulrich the Axe, famed for his bloody deeds among Christians and pagans alike.

Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in.

nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout.

Oamenii nevoiaÈ™i nu cunosc alt? distracÈ›ie decât uciderea oamenilor nevoiaÈ™i. Dintre toate creaturile pe care omul le ucide pentru propria-i distracÈ›ie, exista una pe care o ucide din ir? - alÈ›i oameni. Omul nu ur??te nimic aÈ™a cum se ur??te pe sine. De aceea r?zboiul este numit lepra sufletului uman.

NIkad se nisam zamajavao nacelima vernosti ili okovima tradicionalnog. Cestitost je patolosko nasilje a dobrota prepreka.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society's humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.

Power was thought to be synonymous with economic capacity before people discovered that economic and industrial capacity are only its modern prerequisites. In a sense, economic power could bring governments to heel because they had the same faith in economics as the plain businessmen who had somehow convinced them that the state's means of violence had to be used exclusively for protection of business interests and national property.

For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.

Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.

If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument.

Words used for the purpose of fighting lose their quality of speech; they become clichés. The extent to which clichés have crept into our everyday language and discussions may well indicate the degree to which we not only have deprived ourselves of the faculty of speech, but are ready to use more effective means of violence than bad books (and only bad books can be good weapons) with which to settle our arguments.

there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.