Quotes About Violence

When victims are murdered by strangers, young people are more likely to be the perpetrators. "During 1976–1991, only 20 percent of all homicides were between strangers, whereas 34 percent of those committed by male juveniles were between strangers

The United States has a homicide rate three times that of Canada; two-thirds of those homicides are committed with firearms. A child in the United States is twelve times more likely to die of a firearm injury than a child in Canada. I could go on. The evidence in support of Canada's attitude and legislative action is so convincing only an idiot wouldn't get it.

Even the wettest violence, in the end, is cooked down to the stuff of court cases; a ream of paper, a few exhibits, a dozen...witnesses. The world looks away, and why not?

efficiently the system worked. A courthouse is a factory, sorting violence into a taxonomy of crimes, processing

Who among you would stand up, step out of that jury box, and trade places with me? Who would be accused of a violent murder based on…nothing? How would you prove your innocence when there was never any proof against you in the first place?

Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy's chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.

understood that the actual reason courtrooms often have no windows is to prevent the parties from heaving lawyers out of them.

I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of hurting him if I was going to kill him

not a bullet hole but a "ballistically induced aperture in the subcutaneous environment.

He read about humanitys age-old racial struggles. Had it really been less than half a millennium since humans contrived gigantic, fatuous lies about each other simply because of pigment shades, and killed millions because they believed their own lies?

It seemed to her suddenly that violence was an inescapable factor of the heart, perhaps the most important factor of all—an ineradicable thing that lay, like a bad seed, behind kindness, behind compassion, behind the embrace of love itself. Sometimes it lay deeply hidden, sometimes it lay close to the surface; but always it was there, ready to appear, under the right conditions, in all its irrational dreadfulness.

Christine read the text slowly, shook her head, and thought: Is there nothing but violence everywhere? Is there no real peace anywhere in the world? She wondered if her daughter should be taught such things, but sighing in a gentle protest, feeling that others surely knew more about these matters of faith than she did, she asked her daughter the questions required.

And the violence we will reap, Is bred from the anger we sow.

Schumacher posited that people must make a serious shift in what they consider to be wealth and progress: "Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom.

can protect the relatives of the victim from atavism.

He hit McMaster twice, with the left from fear, with the right from courtesy.

Real terror – the genuine belief that your life is about to end violently – erases everything but itself from the brain.

In time freed from public fornication, the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were occupied in killing one another in tavern brawls or over tavern wenches; at the dinner table, lacking access to the fork, they used their knives to settle slights as well as scores.33

If a violent act is violent only in virtue of some antecedent violent intention, it is equally true that an intention to do violence is revealed only when someone acts violently.

Do you know how much damage we could do to each other in an hour?

some might say: 'Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc., are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.' But this is not what is being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man's action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought.

One [cop] said he'd enjoyed the fracas. "Them queers have a good sense of humor and really had a good time," he said. His "buddy" protested: "Aw, they're sick. I like nigger riots better because there's more action, but you can't beat up a fairy. They ain't mean like blacks, they're sick. But you can't hit a sick man.

One police officer tried to pick a fight with passing gay men by repeatedly challenging them, saying, "Start something, faggot; just start something. I'd like to break your ass wide open." When one man finally turned and said, "What a Freudian comment, Officer!" the cop attacked the man and arrested him, placing him in a patrol wagon to be taken to jail.

though they are on the whole less violent, personal relations in modern urban communities also lack the intimacy and continuity of those in most traditional societies. Increasingly, they are casual, anonymous, and fleeting.