Quotes About Violence

guns were a complicated business, and once you pointed a weapon at someone, especially someone with a weapon of his own, the thing you were counting on to protect you was just as likely to turn you into a corpse.

Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.

Never underestimate the importance of war. War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul.

One beer too many, and a verbal dispute suddenly and unexpectedly explodes into a punching match. Such things happen every night in bars, pubs, and cafés all across the world, but the bloody noses and aching jaws that generally follow from these dustups in Canada, Norway, or France often turn out to be gunshot wounds in the United States.

One gapes at the wonder of those headphones. A man is about to toss two canisters of tear gas into a crowd of four hundred people and then open fire on them with a shotgun, semi-­automatic rifle, and a handgun, and yet his nerves are so delicately strung that he cannot bear to listen to the clamor and the screams those actions will inevitably provoke.

Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war.

In April of 1945, in the Dachau concentration camp, several men were lined up against the wall, tortured, and shot. Such savagery was typical for Dachau. Tens of thousands of prisoners had been murdered there, through starvation, execution, the gas chamber, and even grotesque medical experiments. But this incident happened after the camp had been liberated. The victims were captured German soldiers, and it was the American liberators who were doing the killing.

Part of the answer is that Sandy Hook was a single event. The murders in Chicago are more of a steady background noise. We're constituted so that novel and unusual events catch our attention and trigger our emotional responses.

There is a saying in the Middle East that "poverty is the mother of terrorism." And hopelessness is the mother of a lot of violence in the world. If the choice is between going to a great banquet in heaven with seventy virgins versus living a life of unemployment and poverty, some will be willing to blow themselves up to escape this life.

War is still going on in the hearts and minds of men. This is where it must first be stopped, for it is there that the explosives, whether they later take the form of small bullets or tremendously destructive atom bombs, begin their existence.

The thin, sharp wires strung across the valley mouth sliced through his neck and sent the blood-spurting head bouncing like a ball amongst the loose shale.

Thomas Merton once said that some of the most violent people he met were social activists, in what they did to themselves.

We were convinced about the rightness of our projects. And we were angry about the wrongness of the Salvadoran and American governments' projects. This conviction and this anger introduced a certain violence into our words and sometimes our conduct, never physical, but nonetheless harmful.

Actions and words that flow from anger are generally going to be violent, physically, verbally, psychologically. Their purpose will be to hurt. For this reason, Buddhists hold that if you're trying to combine compassion with anger, you're kidding yourself. Anger opens the door to violence. And once you're violent, you've cut off your interconnectedness and profoundly jeopardized your ability to love.

There is an enormous difference between seeing people as the victims of innate shortcomings and seeing them as the victims of structural violence. Indeed, it is likely that the struggle for rights is undermined whenever the history of unequal chances, and of oppression, is erased or distorted.

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower your class.

At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.

In America's 'nonlinear war', with no frontline or clear political or territorial goals, the number of enemy killed apparently revealed who was 'winning'. 'The military kill' became 'the prime target, simply because the essential political target is too elusive for us, or worse, because we do not understand its importance'.

a wild and dangerous place where brigandage and battle were inextricably woven into a unique culture of warriors and monks. Decapitated heads ornamented the trees and gateposts. Severed hands festooned the government buildings. The Chinese and Tibetans skinned men alive, chopped them into chunks, and boiled them to death in giant cauldrons.1

t was once famously said that it is as well that wars are so ruinously expensive, else we would never stop fighting them. However well said, it seems also to be endlessly forgotten that, while there may be just wars and unjust wars, there are never any cheap wars.

and what is a good weapon but a good idea made murderous flesh?

We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter but with guns.