Quotes About Violence

Living in the modern age, death for virtue is the wage. So it seems in darker hours. Evil wins, kindness cowers. Ruled by violence and vice we all stand upon thin ice. Are we brave or are we mice, here upon such thin, thin ice? Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?

When men in power decide that things need to be rebalanced at any cost, the violence is never brief and never really directed solely at the imbalance that supposedly inspired it. The rule of law becomes the rule of violence. Revenge becomes a synonym for justice. No city is safe from such horror, no nation, no time in all of history. Be ready to recognize the moment. Be always ready.

People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.

The hatred of truth is the taproot of violence.

Malevolence and paranoia cohabit in a twisted mind. Bad men trust no one because they know the treachery of which they themselves are capable. Bad men...destroy one another, although...they prefer those who are innocent and as pure as this world allows them to be. They feed on violence, but they feast on the despoiling of what is good.

Maybe it was this: The name of a person marked for murder is just a name, but the face makes real the cost of violence, for if we have the nerve to look, we can see in any face our own vulnerability.

A cynic once said that the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.

When animals fight, it is with the intent to kill and with the understanding that they may be killed.

It's not right that gentleness meet horror.

Ich hatte nicht viel Ahnung von [der christlichen] Religion. Es gab kaum Götter, und sie galt als gewalttätig. Allerdings hatte sie gute Schulen.

We worried for her. We tend to assume the worst, here in Willesden. We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return.

It was like tag, but a girl was never "It," only boys were "It," girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.

But it's my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is "the family" is always an event of some violence. It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.

There was a sense in which she couldn't quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew—from Lambert only—that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it "that nonsense," or sometimes "those ridiculous people," because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her.

We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own. If the patient dies from the treatment, it was not because the medicine was not good.

They fought and somehow he managed to bite Tea Cake high up on his cheek-bone once.

If dat wuz mah wife, said Walter Thomas, Ah'd kill her cemetery dead.

Whereupon Jim flopped into a chair and held forth at great length on the necessity of keeping wives in their places; to wit: speechless and expressionless in the presence of their lords and masters and cited several instances where men had met their downfall and utter ruin by ill advisedly permitting their wives to air their ignorance by talking. His audience, composed entirely of males, agreed with him. Wife-beaters are numberous in Poplar Street.

War is an abstraction.

Abuse is not love. That's no way to treat a woman.

Violence is totally accepted in this country.

I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.

I'm afraid this man will kill me some day.

The right to kill another person is not a right that I would agree with and support.