Quotes About Violence

States without the death penalty have had consistently lower murder rates. And national murder rates have declined steadily since 1992, despite fewer executions.

There's a difference between criminals and crooks. Crooks steal. Criminals blow some guy's brains out. I'm a crook.

We've got to look to our educational programs and focus on doing what we can to stem violence in the schools.

There are things about organized religion which I resent. Christ is revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in His name than any other figure in history. You show me one step forward in the name of religion, and I'll show you a hundred retrogressions.

relatively powerless—the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the

Behavior that Christians would never support in any other context suddenly becomes perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, simply because the state has declared that a war is under way. (That's what Voltaire meant when he said, "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.")

We're being attacked for what we do in the Islamic world, not for who we are or what we believe in or how we live.

Iron sleet of arrowy showerHurtles in the darken'd air.

[In a state of nature] No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Homo homini lupus

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.

If men are naturally in a state of war, why do they always carry arms and why do they have keys to lock their doors?

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures?

If you see Roxanne," said Thumps, "you might tell her to mind her own business." Chintak paled. "We are friends, are we not?" "We are." "Friends should not suggest such dangerous enterprises." "Roxanne is all bark." "Ah," said Chintak, "then the stories of gratuitous violence are not true?

Where words prevail not, violence prevails; But gold doth more than either of them both.

As late as 1742, London hatters beat to death a man who dared shape headgear without having gone through the apprentice system.

Violence without violation is only a noise heard by no one, the most horrendous sound in the universe.

Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and whatever else that—with a smattering of emotive images and strains of maudlin music—can move the average citizen to tears or violence, the pessimist is invisible in both history books and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, he could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause. Pessimists are indeed lackadaisical as partisans in the human drama.

Telling people to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it's up there.

In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.