Quotes About Violence

Bioarchaeologists have linked the agricultural transition to a significant decline in nutrition and to increases in disease, mortality, overwork, and violence in areas where skeletal remains make it possible to compare human welfare before and after the change.

It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe's 'saturation reporting' was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos.

As the ordinary violence of dawn sweeps across the lower Coromandel coast, a sprawling village comes into view.

a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect, and persuade others, that a leader or policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are.

We talked—mostly, he talked—about the war. He has no interest in why it had happened or why Germany had lost—his stock of anecdotes all seem to revolve around an essential disbelief that men could do such things to one another. And not just the cruel and violent things. In such conditions he finds man's humanity to man even harder to credit.

Just twenty-one years after Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair.

The European habit of indiscriminately killing women and children when engaged in hostilities with the natives of the Americas was more than an atrocity. It was flatly and intentionally genocidal. For no population can survive if its women and children are destroyed.

While significant strides have been made in the pursuit of life expectancy, healthcare, educational opportunities, and constitutional protections for women, the Supreme Court, in particular, still wrestles with their status, as evidenced by their problems in pursuing equal opportunity in education and employment, reproductive freedom, the military, and violence against women.

Now do you see why war irritates me? It's always the same. A lot of people get killed, but in the end, the whole thing is settled at the conference table. The notion of having the conference first doesn't seem to occur to people.

it seems to me that this kind of hero—privileged, self-assured, the perpetual heir to the kingdom, and not averse to violence—has been and continues to be lauded throughout history.

Don't, Jar. There's been enough killing." "It'll never be enough! They murdered Dad!

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

Kore's personal arms were embroidered on the front—on a field gules, a vulture sable vorant a child—a black vulture on a red field devouring a child. Too gaudy for ordinary wear, but perfect for greeting barbarians at the gate.

Through social "contagion," groups magnify aggressive tendencies, much as they polarize other tendencies. Examples are youth gangs, soccer fans, rapacious soldiers, urban rioters, and what Scandinavians call "mobbing"— schoolchildren in groups repeatedly harassing or attacking an insecure, weak schoolmate (Lagerspetz & others, 1982). Mobbing is a group activity.

Love affairs that start in blood tend to end up in blood.

And, for the everyday party members, it was, as the cheerful rhyme of the time went, 'Wenn die Olympiade vorbei, schlagen wir die Juden zu Brei' – 'When the Olympics are over, we will beat the Jews to a pulp'. It was open season again.

For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed.

if one accepts Jean Piaget's famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.

In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.

It's legitimate for the police to use violence because they are enforcing the law; the law is legitimate because it's rooted in the constitution; the constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people; the people created the constitution by acts of illegal violence. The obvious question, then: How does one tell the difference between "the people" and a mere rampaging mob?

Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.

Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind ("cross this line and I will shoot you," "one more word out of any of you and you're going to jail"). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid.

So: Police are bureaucrats with weapons. If you think about it, this is a really ingenious trick. Because when most of think about police, we do not think of them as enforcing regulation. We think of them as fighting crime, and when we think of "crime," the kind of crime we have in our minds in violent crime. Even though, in fact, what police mostly do is exactly the opposite: they bring the threat of force to bear on situations that would otherwise have nothing to do with it.