Quotes About Violence

El cadáver de Gustavo tenía treinta y siete heridas. Había en sus bolsillos sesenta y tres pesos, tres cartas de su esposa Carolina y un libro de apuntes cuya última frase era: «Todo está perdido. Los soldados no quieren pelear».

La de la Revolución Mexicana es una historia en la que mucho se mata y mucho se muere, en la que la vida humana parece valer muy poco y la supervivencia es tan accidental y casual como la muerte. Avitia rescata las frases en un corrido terrible: 'Como saben que en México se mata y que a diario se muere por acá'.

I've said many times that statistics reveal a surprising city: one that has more movie theaters than Paris, more abortions than London, more universities than New York. Where nighttime has become sparse, desolate, the kingdom of only a few. Where violence rules, corners us, silences us into a kind of autism.

But war, as we will see, creates its own motives as combat escalates, and it rarely follows a course that does not have unintended consequences that subordinate its original purpose.71

Several times in my life, I've sat with women, friends of mine, who reveal, sometimes shyly, sometimes proudly, bruises of one kind or another, and I know I've said, "If it happens one time, leave him," I've said, "It doesn't matter how much you love him. Leave him if it happens one time." And I've said it with utter confidence, as if I knew what the hell I was talking about, as if violence was something that could be easily defined.

I've got no tolerance for a man who hurts women. Every man on this planet owes his life to a woman. I hope they catch the bastard and hang him by his nuts.

Once a 'Romeo Pimp' has gained a victim's trust, he systematically breaks down her resistance, support systems, and self-esteem. Victims are coerced into submission through gang rape, confinement, beatings, torture, cutting, tattooing, burning, branding, being deprived of basic needs, and threats of murder."   —The State of Human Trafficking in California

It was an ugly flower, pink with yellow-tipped stamens sticking out of the center. It deserved to die. Zoe pulled the hammer back in a slow motion and snapped it forward. There was a delicious sound of cracking plaster as the flower dissolved into rubble. White dust rose all around here. "I hate that wallpaper," she said

They say that chess was born in bloodshed.

I had to kill or be killed... It was the only way I could survive... But I never enjoyed it like YOU do. Yes, my EYE is different from yours... But never forget... I'm also human.

We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.

Violence is what we get when we do not know what else to do with our suffering.

During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called "soldier's heart."8 The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another's integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions.

But if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves—violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding out lives in check until we honor its truth.

My core religious beliefs include this simple article of faith: the God who gave all of us life wants us to do the same for each other. When people or groups who claim religious motivation make their points by using violence in any form—spiritual, psychological, verbal, or physical—it seems clear to me that they are driven by fear rather than faith, committed to control instead of trust in God.

Hidden in my desire to become a naval aviator was something more complex: a personal engagement with the problem of violence that expressed itself at first in military fantasies and then, over a period of many years, resolved itself in the pacifism I aspire to today.

Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means.

The urban barbarism that has turned our streets into battlegrounds and our classrooms into killing fields will not be stopped by an assault on the Second Amendment right of American gunowners to keep and bear arms.

Terrorism is the price of empire. If you do not wish to pay the price, you must give up the empire.

Now, contemplating her battered body, he reflected that the violence it revealed was also something many women met daily.

Fuck her standing, Fuck her lying, Cut her throat and fuck her dying, Dig her up and fuck her rotten

There's no question that jihad historically means war.

Damn it," I said. "I don't suppose you have any ideas on how to kill Littleton." He smiled at me, his teeth very white in the darkness of his face. "Eat him," he said.