logo

Quotes About Violence

Every monarch in the world, except the Emperor of China, wears a military uniform, and bestows the greatest rewards on the man who kills the greatest number of his fellow-creatures.
~ Leo Tolstoy
When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I.
~ Leo Tolstoy
The mob is terrible—disgusting," he said to himself in French. "They are like wolves whom nothing but flesh can appease.
~ Leo Tolstoy
War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game.
~ Leo Tolstoy
In the corporal's changed face, in the sound of his voice, in the stirring and deafening noise of the drums, he recognized that mysterious, callous force which compelled people against their will to kill their fellow men—that force the effect of which he had witnessed during the executions. To fear or to try to escape that force, to address entreaties or exhortations to those who served as its tools, was useless.
~ Leo Tolstoy
They come together, like tomorrow, to kill each other they slaughter and maim tens of thousands of men, and the they say their prayers of thanksgiving of having slaughtered so many people (inflating the numbers), and proclaim victory, supposing that the more people slaughtered, the greater the merit How God does look down and listen to them!
~ Leo Tolstoy
Government authority, even if it does suppress private violence, always introduces into the life of men fresh forms of violence, which tend to become greater and greater in proportion to the duration and strength of the government.
~ Leo Tolstoy
To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.
~ Leo Tolstoy
indeed: more than five hundred National Socialists were murdered by the communists. Thousands were grievously injured. The SA was a volunteer, non-government organization
~ Leon Degrelle
In nearly all instances of slave violence against their owners, whites tended to blame the Yankees, as did Emma Holmes, for having aroused "the foulest demoniac passions of the negro, hitherto so peaceful and happy." At least, such explanations preserved whites from what would have otherwise been a most excruciating self-examination.86
~ Leon F. Litwack
The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.
~ Leon Trotsky
Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.
~ Leon Trotsky
A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!
~ Leon Trotsky
Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.
~ Leon Trotsky
The revolution lays out the ground for a new society. But it does so with the methods of the old society, with the class struggle, with violence, destruction and annihilation. If the proletarian revolution had not come, mankind would have been strangled by its own contradictions. The revolution saved society and culture, but by means of the most cruel surgery.
~ Leon Trotsky
The first days of war were the first days of disgrace. After a series of partial catastrophes, in the spring of 1915 came the general retreat. The generals took out their own criminal incapacity on the peaceful population. Enormous tracts of land were violently laid waste. Clouds of human locusts were driven to the rear with whips. The external rout was completed with an internal one.
~ Leon Trotsky
As the third anniversary of the September 11th attacks draws near we must ensure our nation is prepared to handle the continued threat of violence and terrorism on our country.
~ Leonard Boswell
If we today could rediscover the virtue in that Name, the victory in that Name, the violence in that Name, we could set this world alight for God. Most of us have enough grace to scrape through the day, but we have nothing over. We are conquerors but are not "more than conquerors." We can fight off the enemy but cannot take any prisoners. Ours is a defense action, not an attacking power.
~ Leonard Ravenhill
If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.
~ Leonard Sax
The violent but narrow passions that pass under the name of patriotism are not the noblest forms of human and social emotions. The world, or the people who, unfortunately, have most to say in governing the world, believe no such thing, and will not believe it when the representatives of States meet again to decide how to fill up the graves which they helped dig in Europe.
~ Leonard Woolf
There is no beast more cruel than man.
~ Leonid Andreyev
Men are always murderers, and their calmness and generosity is the calmness of a well-fed animal, that knows itself out of danger.
~ Leonid Andreyev
I cannot get accustomed to war; my brain refuses to understand and explain a thing that is senseless in its basis. Millions of people gather at one place and, giving their actions order and regularity, kill each other, and it hurts everybody equally, and all are unhappy -- what is it if not madness?
~ Leonid Andreyev
The Italian Renaissance was as much an age of culture and learning as of violence and deceit.
~ Leonie Frieda