Quotes About Violence

No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers.

Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defense, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate.

The more effective the chauvinistic propaganda, the easier it was to persuade public opinion of the necessity for a supranational structure which would rule from above and without national distinctions by a universal monopoly of power and the instruments of violence.

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.

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

Je?eli stosujemy przemoc jako ?rodek maj?cy prowadzi? do celu, cel ten czasami si? zmienia lub nigdy nie zostaje osi?gni?ty.

Since violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements (as Engels pointed out long ago),2 the revolution of technology, a revolution in toolmaking, was especially marked in warfare.

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.

War in the era of machines could not possibly breed virtues like chivalry, courage, honor or manliness ... It imposed upon men nothing but the experience of bare destruction together with the humiliation of being only small cogs in the majestic wheel of slaughter.

South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics.

The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments. To claim, as is often done, that a tiny unarmed minority has successfully, by means of violence—shouting, kicking up a row, et cetera—disrupted large lecture classes whose overwhelming majority had voted for normal instruction procedures is therefore very misleading.

Pop, pop, sounded in the air, and the two wild geese fell dead among the rushes, and the water was tinged with blood.

There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.

America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.

There should have been a dark whisper in the wind. Or maybe a deep chill in the bone. Something. An ethereal song only Elizabeth or I could hear. A tightness in the air. Some textbook premonition. There are misfortunes we almost expect in life—what happened to my parents, for example—and then there are other dark moments, moments of sudden violence that alter everything. There was my life before the tragedy. There is my life now. The two have very little in common.

Everything," she said. Her mouth tightened. "Stewart Green was a psychopath. He stalked me. He beat me. He threatened to kill me." "Why?" "What part of the word 'psychopath' confused you?

I turned to Otto. "Why the hell did you hit him like that?" Otto looked back at me with eyes that sent a chill straight through my heart. They were lifeless eyes, not the slightest hint of light behind them. It was as though I were looking into the eyes of an inanimate object—the eyes of an end table, maybe, or a cardboard box. From

It was one lesson he never forgot. You don't sit back when you or a loved one is being assaulted. And you don't act like the goverment with their proportional responses and all that nonsense. If someone hurts you, mercy and pity must be put aside. You eliminate the enemy. You scorch the earth.

Two people, a man and your ex, Maura, are in the car," Reynolds says. "Officer Canton pulls them over for a DUI. Something spooks them. They panic, shoot Officer Canton twice in the back of the head, take off.

Go fuck myself? Seriously? That's the best you can come up with? Really, David, I'm disappointed. I came here for a serious philosophical discussion. We know things others don't. I want to understand what could possess a man to do something so barbaric. To kill his own son.

He had learned a valuable lesson about physical confrontations: You can predict nothing. Sure, whoever lands the first blow usually wins. The bigger man was usually victorious too. But once it got going, once the red tornado took hold of the combatants, anything could happen. The

Some men called them Lenny and George, referring to the Steinbeck characters in Of Mice and Men. There might be some truth to it—Cal was big and impossibly strong—but where Lenny had a gentleness, Cal had none. He was a rock, both physically and emotionally. He could indeed kill a rabbit by petting it, but he wouldn't care much. But

killing the allegorical two birds with one stone, which was a really violent and weird image when you stopped and thought about it. You throw a stone and kill two birds—and this is a good thing?

Myron shook his head. "Violence is always the answer for you, Win." Win frowned. "Stop sounding melodramatic. A man committed a vile act upon you. Squaring things would have helped put it behind you. It's not about vengeance. It's about equilibrium. It's about man's basic need to keep the scales balanced.