Quotes About Violence

Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals.

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

Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible.

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons and internment camps, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.

If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one great, bloody accident.

All in all, the purification of the armed forces, state institutions, and the communist party led to about fifty thousand executions.

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.

When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it.

For violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards. These first challenge the police and military, then penetrate the police and military, and finally transform the police and military.

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. Both

A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938.57

certain kinds of polities, communist party-states such as the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, are capable, in times of peace, of killing large numbers of their own citizens as a matter of deliberate policy.

This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics. —

In the winter of 1942–1943, the Germans began to separate the Jews not into two but into three groups: the men, the older women, and the young women. They sent the young women into the gas last, because they liked to look at their naked bodies in the cold. By then the corpses were burned rather than buried. The pyres were huge grills made from railway rails laid upon concrete pillars, some thirty meters across. By spring 1943, fires

Il primo passo di ogni guerra è la disumanizzazione del nemico. Il nemico non è un uomo come te, quindi non ha gli stessi diritti.

L'unica rivoluzione che serve è quella dentro di te. Le altre si ripetono in maniera costante, perché al fondo c'è la natura dell'uomo. E se l'uomo non cambia, se l'uomo non fa questo salto di qualità, se l'uomo non rinuncia alla violenza, al dominio della materia, al profitto, all'interesse, tutto si ripete.

primo passo di ogni guerra è la disumanizzazione del nemico. Il nemico non è un uomo come te, quindi non ha gli stessi diritti.

FOLCO: Non servono le rivoluzioni? TIZIANO: E da qui il mio passo verso l'unica rivoluzione che serve, quella dentro di te. Le altre le vedi. Le altre si ripetono, si ripetono in maniera costante, perché al fondo c'è la natura dell'uomo. E se l'uomo non cambia, se l'uomo non fa questo salto di qualità, se l'uomo non rinuncia alla violenza, al dominio della materia, al profitto, all'interesse, tutto si ripete, si ripete, si ripete.

l'unica rivoluzione che serve, quella dentro di te. Le altre le vedi. Le altre si ripetono, si ripetono in maniera costante, perché al fondo c'è la natura dell'uomo. E se l'uomo non cambia, se l'uomo non fa questo salto di qualità, se l'uomo non rinuncia alla violenza, al dominio della materia, al profitto, all'interesse, tutto si ripete, si ripete, si ripete.

You want to kill a place, name it. A name only draws the people there who will kill it again. They slice it up or tear it down; they rape the women, burn everyone on pyres, and then, thinking they own it, they name it again. Stupid. Enough to know 'there is a hill and good water, a cross in the road and a strong oak tree.' But do not say it out loud. A home should always stay secret or someone will come to steal it.

She killed her sons first. Hammering a long fence nail through each of their hearts. Then, taking an ax, she methodically beheaded each one of her brothers-in-law. Going out to the pens, she drove the livestock into the barn, bolting it shut, and while the goat kids and spring lambs panicked and brayed, she put all the buildings to flame.

Who cut him?' Sam liked saying things like 'Who cut him?' It reminded him of being a kid and watching prison movies, which is probably why prisoners talked like that, too.