Quotes About Violence

An assembly was again summoned, and different opinions were expressed by different speakers. In the former assembly, Cleon the son of Cleaenetus had carried the decree condemning the Mytilenaeans to death. He was the most violent of the citizens, and at that time exercised by far the greatest influence over the people.

150 miles outside Baghdad and began shooting children. By his own account, he 'saw that children were in the room kneeling down. I

It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty... Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference- a powerful, implacable beauty- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly

Kiowa who saw it happen said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something-Just Boom-then down. Not like in the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle-not like that. Kiowa said. The bastard just flat fuck fell. Boom down. Nothing else.

Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker, Azar said. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat Go away, Kiowa said. I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal.

He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn't keep it in and he couldn't let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start cutting and slashing and never stop. All those years. Climbing like a son of a bitch, clawing his way up inch by fucking inch, and then it all came crashing down at once.

You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To

In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.

Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy's dead. The guy's dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound - the guy's dead. I mean really.

War is brutal. Civilians just suffer through it

Bacon flinched, then with hollow flippancy quoted the Book of Judges: "With the jawbone of an ass you have slain your thousands.

I have never been a violent man. Just a little creepy, it seems.

After all, there's no shape or image in modern culture to match that of the gun. Nothing else has its universal authority or saving promise

The gun's slinky power has a special appeal to the young, the weak, the confused and the powerless. To those overlooked or spurned, access to a firearm is the spark of agency. With a gun in your hands, everything is possible. In a moment you imagine the respect it demands.

Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, "If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps."68

Lord you gave your only son to remedy a condition, but who knows but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.

What the migrants learned by word of mouth has since been established as fact. Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.

If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't."13

the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.

Milam and Bryant were not on a political mission when they pounded on Moses Wright's door, and they did not kidnap Emmett Till beneath the banner of states' rights, racial integrity, or white supremacy. The white men carried out their brutal errand in an atmosphere created by the Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the mass of white public opinion, all of which demanded that African Americans remain the subservient mudsill of Mississippi—or die.

According to William Bradford Huie, Milam later justified Till's lynching using the terms of violent racial and sexual politics: Just as long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are going to stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government

People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.

They beat hell out of you for any reason or no reason. It's the greatest pleasure of their lives.

Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't."30