Quotes About Violence

the force it takes to pull a trigger is out of all proportion to the force of the bullet that does the killing.

There was a Swedish team that had even managed to torpedo the myth of the English bobby and reduce it to its proper proportions, namely, to the fact that the English police are not armed and therefore don't provoke violence to the same degree as certain others. Even in Denmark responsible authorities had managed to grasp this fact, and only in exceptional situations were policemen permitted to sign out weapons.

Sprawled, bloody, holding the pistol, he looked like a police photograph of a suicide. Dart went back to his chair and picked up the Smith and Wesson. Five minutes passed like a year.

We should just bomb them back to the Stone Age.

I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense I call it intelligence.

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance.

Our earliest ancestors evolved a psychological switch that allowed them to dehumanize and kill members of their own species, and our modern weapons help too, by depersonalizing killing.

Cruelty takes many forms, but all those forms depend on the human hability to dehumanize and de-individualize another person.

We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species.

The evidence of history is that no advance which can be applied to the killing of other human beings goes unused.

killing other members of our own species -a rarity in the animal kingdom- is a male behavior that evolved early in our history, because those individuals who manifested such a predisposition were more likely to transmit their genes to the next generation than those who didn't. War and violence, then, are indelibly linked to sex and reproduction.

Systematic rape is one of the most hideous, and most explicitly male, expressions of warfare, but it is hardly the only one. All wars are extraordinarily costly in material terms and grotesquely painful in human terms. Yet wars are so much a part of the human experience that we don't always pause to realize that one of the most astonishing aspects of war is the very fact that we so regularly go out and deliberately kill members of our own species.

Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.

For history and biology also show that even if we are a violent species, in which males have an inborn predisposition to engage in team aggression, the specific conditions of our environment, culture, economic well-being, and demographic structure can have dramatic impacts on how our most fundamental impulses are expressed.

People who can see their neighbors with air-conditioning and cars, but who themselves live in shacks and often lack sewage disposal or a reliable water supply, have little to lose, and may find violence a rational option.

The transition that we make with age reflects not only our growing experience and shifting philosophies, but also a changing willingness to engage in or condone violence. Young men are the revolutionaries, the superstar computer programmers, the best athletes, the most courageous soldiers, the bravest mountaineers, and the most creative musicians, but they are also the most vicious gang members and nearly all the suicidal terrorists.

If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.

The truth is our disconnection with Earth translates into a kind of disrespect of the feminine. How far can you go in violating the mother that gave you life? As long as the feminine is diminished the connection between us and the Earth will always be underscored by a big question mark. We have abused the Earth so much that we don't know which direction to go. We must wonder about this increasing masculinity that is translated in terms of repeated violence or love of it.

Who did it, Sephy?' She repeated. 'Who beat you up? 'Cause whoever it was, I'll kill them.

Political terrorism which results in the death or serious injury of even one Cross always has been and always will be a capital crime. Those found guilty will suffer the death sentence, no two ways about it …

If you'd slapped me or punched me or even stabbed me, sooner or later it would have stopped hurting.

God knows nothing gets accomplished in the world these days without terrorism.

It is clear that the way to heal society of its violence... and lack of love is to replace the pyramid of domination with the circle of equality and respect.