Quotes About Violence

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.

It is the violent act that makes history and changes everything that came before.

Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me.

Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?

I wanted to free myself from that montage of speed, guns, torture, rape, orgy and consumer packaging which constitutes the vision of sex in America.

Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don't understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.

As I listened I thought a featureless baggy man was striking me in slow motion with a well-polished stone.

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don't understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.

Even after you think you've seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined.

Murray said, "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

On the other hand I myself have impulses toward violence uneasily concealed. Especially when I look out of the window at the men and women, walking along in the course of a day because I spend so much time, as we all do, looking out of windows to determine what is out there, and what should be done about it.

Chekisty with smoking revolvers ran back and cocked the triggers immediately. The legs of those shot jerked in convulsions. . . . Two men in grey greatcoats nimbly put nooses round the necks of the corpses, dragged them off to a dark niche in the cellar. Two others with spades dug at the earth, directing steaming rivulets of blood. Solomin, his revolver in his belt, sorted out the linen of those shot. He carefully made separate

Than the crunch of broken lives and bones. This is why when our eyes are languid And passion begins to seethe stormily in the breast, I want to write on your sentence One unquavering thing: "Up against a wall! Shoot!" 23

They read denunciations, certificates, cases. They hurriedly signed sentences. They yawned. They drank wine. [ . . . ] At night they chased barefooted, naked people Over ice-covered stones Against a northeast wind Into wastelands outside town. [ . . . ] They threw them, not all killed yet, into a pit. They hurriedly covered them with earth.

I've always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.

a man in whom violence boiled below the surface in much the same way that fresh-poured polenta waited for the chance to burn the mouth of anyone who tried to eat it.

It would take, he calculated, more than an hour. First a cream-filled swan and a coffee at Tonolo, then the walk to Campo San Barnaba and the store that sold the good cheese and the bread from Puglia. He had fled his office in search of peace and quiet, seeking some evidence that sanity still existed in a world of violence and crime, and his wife suggested they spend an hour eating pastry and buying a loaf of bread. He leaped at the chance.

A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.

Um, we don't hit women in America." He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. "No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.

And your point is?? My point is like, democracy is excuse for any fucking thing. Violence ...greed ...stupidity... anything is ok if Americans do it. Right? Am I right? You really can't shut up, can you?

Then I tug the toaster from the wall and swing the appliance around my head like a lasso. I'm not aiming to knock her out. I'm aiming to knock off her fucking head.