Quotes About Violence

After dangling in a summer breeze for eight hours, the bodies were cut down by a deputy at dawn. The woman at the roadside robbery scene later said there had been no rape; she had made the story up.

They also bombed their own headquarters—and blamed it on Catholics.

I want to put all the Catholics, Jews and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft," said a Klan speaker in rural Whitley County, just outside Fort Wayne. His suggestion was met with wild applause.

The 6,000 or so Black residents were forced into tenements and shacks in Baptisttown, a shank of the city without electricity or indoor plumbing. They were constantly harassed. Memories of a 1903 slaughter—twelve Blacks murdered and four saloons burned to the ground by a white mob—still haunted.

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X's later observation that the Klan had 'changed its bedsheets for a policeman's uniform

It scares them because of the forced intimacy with a place that gives nothing back to a stranger, a place where the land and its weather—probably the most violent and extreme on earth—demand only one thing: humility.

No Country for Old Men

A shrill, glass-endangering scream of outrage from the direction of the stage yanked me around just in time to see the guitarist swing his gleaming back Stratocaster at the drummer's head. He struck with the kind of accuracy that comes only with years of practice and/or extremely vivid wishful thinking.

The percentage of the world's murder victims who are killed in libraries is statistically negligible.

The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all.

Some scholars claim that over 250,000 people were put to death for the crime of Witchcraft during the "burning times" in Europe, while others say the number reached as high as nine million.

Whoever said violence never solved anything doesn't know what he's talking about. Violence is the only language some people understand. Not that I'm fluent, but I know enough to get by.

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.

Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.

It was easier to triumph in violence that it was to make a new order.

When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters.

Hitler and Stalin both accepted a late-nineteenth-century Darwinistic modification: progress was possible, but only as a result of violent struggle between races or classes.

Accepting the markings as a natural part of the urban landscape was already a compromise with a murderous future.

All in all, regular policemen murdered more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen. Many of them had no special preparation for this task. They found themselves in an unknown land, they had their orders, and they did not want to look weak. In the rare cases when they refused these orders to murder Jews, policemen were not punished.

The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence.

As an SS officer said to the guards at Dachau: "Any of the comrades who can't see blood should resign. The more of these bastards go down, the fewer of them we'll have to feed."4

Be wary of paramilitaries.

Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler's opponents during his rallies. As