Quotes About Violence

The mere possession of a gun is, in itself, an urge to kill, not only by design, but by accident, by madness, by fright, by bravado.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

There's a reason there aren't any fifty-five-year-old terrorists, or at least there weren't until they all started watching Fox News. Destroying things is for the young.

You can't say civilization isn't advancing: in every war, they kill you in a new way.

You can't say civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.

You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.

you can't say civilization dont advance, in every war they kill you in a new way

Ishmael Beah's memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone.

When we confine animals for food, destroying their family and community connections, obliterating their connection with the earth and with their habitats, and thwarting their intelligent drives, we commit extreme violence against not only these creatures, but against the whole interconnected system of intelligence that supports them and that they serve.

The violence described in the Old Testament was endemic to the ancient Near East and remains endemic to much of the world today. Although our refined Western sensibilities recoil from these violent passages, in fact the Old Testament is to be credited for presenting the human condition in all its starkness

In 2009, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second-in-command, declared: 'He [Obama] is trying to say: "Do not hate us … but we will continue to kill you".

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force.

We bomb homes, and these people have families -- and the U.S. refuses to apologize for these civilian deaths. The absence of concern makes their actions almost equal to a deliberate targeting of civilians.

What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely discredited?

Is it any wonder that countless Americans—bearing psyches no less malleable than those of other members of the species—are only dimly conscious of the fact that they even have the right to be unequivocally opposed to a war effort and to question the government's real reasons for carrying it out, without thinking of themselves as (horror of horrors) "unpatriotic"? Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

It is the difference between hitting with a pillow and hitting with a baseball bat.

A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead.

You saw the race riots in Watts. . . . Do nice people go around burning and looting — and even killing? Not since last night. When our Marines razed a village outside Khe Sanh in North Vietnam.

Granted, he found little to say for the Plains Indians, an uninteresting race in need of humanization, made hideous by nature. He assumed everyone was an enemy until proven otherwise, and expected they would have to be killed, since violence was "the only corrective they understand.

bullet wound n. ballistically induced aperture in the subcutaneous environment

civilian casualties n. collateral damage When General Bernard Rogers was asked if collateral damage meant civilian casualties, he said "Yes.

combat n. violence processing (DOD)