Quotes About Violence

The degeneracy of a mob has no equal. It combines the mentality of the bigot, the coward, the sadist and the molester and the rapist. If there is an exception, I've yet to see it. I would love to line up a few of the participants in my sights.

In Montana I knew a twenty-one-year-old kid who killed two people before he got to prison, then killed or helped kill five more during a riot. He had to be awakened from a sound sleep the afternoon of his execution. The

If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem.

I do not mean to assault anyone's sensibilities, but once you face death or reach out and touch it with your hand, or look into the half-lidded eyes of a woman or child or man whose life has been violently taken, you bond with them and silently try to console them for the theft of their lives. You promise to carry them in your heart and never tell anyone about it. I think that's what humanity is about.

When a man molests a woman or girl, he steals her identity. You don't know who you are anymore. You don't have an address or a home. You're nothing. It's like a stain you can't wash out of your soul

said. "Whatdid you say?" she said. He shifted his rifle to his left hand and spun her in the opposite direction, then pushed her hard between the shoulder blades, snapping her head back. When she

I've killed men against whom I had no grievance.

I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman's blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table.

Unless you are familiar with the nature of Southern white trash, you will not understand the following: They are a genetically produced breed whose commonality is a state of mind and not related to the social class to which they belong. Economics has nothing to do with their origins or their behavior. You cannot change them. They glory in violence and cruelty and brag on their ignorance, and would have no problem manning the ovens at Auschwitz. That's not hyperbole.

A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable's blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time of need.

You look at the history of any sentient species and what do you find but tableaux of violence and slaughter. It's finger-painted on the ceilings of caves and engraved into the walls of temples.

Wilhuff had had ample time to grow accustomed to the sight, scent, and taste of blood, but he had never seen so much human blood spilled in one place.

I ripped her. I shoved my hand in her blouse and jerked. She was wide open from her throat to her belly. "You got that climbing out. You caught it in the door handle." My voice sounded queer, like it was coming out of a tin phonograph. "And this you don't know how you got." I hauled off and hit her in the eye as hard as I could.

It was a violent breakthrough against an older social structure.

It began to appear that something larger than a lady's thimble might be needed to hold the blood shed in this war.

White folks got insane after the Old Man done his bit, they went on a rampage and attacked coloreds for miles. They was scared outta their minds. I reckon in some fashion, they ain't been the same since.

He ain't dead. They say just his ear's shot off." "That don't sound like me. It ain't smart to shoot a man's ear off. A man ain't got but two.

If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God's sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot.

They'll pull the trigger and tell the hammer to hurry.

They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence. Their "I was raised with nuthin' and went to Harvard anyway" experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream.

This was not a just war after all—it was just a war: yet another exercise in consecrated barbarity and sanctified slaughter.

War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.

Boy, you just can't kill people like you used to

Fang was going to kill me. And after I was dead, he would kill me again.