Quotes About Violence

The civil war in Syria is complex and devastating.

If you're in part of rebel-controlled Syria, and suddenly your house blows up or a building next to you blows up, it would be convenient for rebels to say, 'It was the Americans.'

In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map. Libya was stable. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a really big, big reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was somewhat under control.

Bombing Syria will achieve nothing.

I can't help but believe that at some time in the not-too-distant future, there is going to be another movement to change these systemic conditions of poverty, injustice, and violence in people's lives. That is where we've got to go, and it is going to be a struggle.

#MeToo shows this bias is systemic, that people get away with violence against women, get away with discrimination - whether in work or society in general - because, for too long, silence has been the answer.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

There was no deeper truth in the mundanity of violence. That truth sat on the surface and required no mining at all.

How do you say, 'Bring me steak and eggs or I'll slit your throat' in Italian?

Meekness disarms the violent.

I've a mate in the Middlesbrough mob," said Wield. "I'll give him a ring later when they've had time to get things sorted. As for the pistol, don't underestimate them. Close range, one of them gas guns can put a pellet through your eye right into your brain.

The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter.

Het enige dat de mensen verbindt zijn de oorlogen die ze elkaar aandoen.

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

That's why he's called Legion—in a way he's the embodiment of the crowd. It's the crowd that comes out of him and goes and throws itself off of the cliff. We're witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence.

Some primitive societies avoid striking out at the true guilty party because it might awaken the spirit of vengeance. Channeling violence toward a sacrificial victim as if toward a lightning rod doubtless stops violence, but it's not very pretty.

In myth, violent death is always justified.

Violence is the divine force that everyone tries to use for his own purposes and that ends by using everyone for its own—the Dionysus of The Bacchae

In a truly global world, the renunciation of violent reprisal is bound to become, in a more and more obvious way, the indispensable condition of our survival.

The most recent phase of the alternation between Occidentalism and primitivism has therefore concealed the essential thing, the universality of violence. A selective blindness in one of two forms has obscured the fact that all cultures, and all individuals without exception, participate in violence; that violence is what structures our collective sense of belonging and our personal identities.

The account thus shows once again the omnipotence of mimetic contagion. What motivates Pilate, as he hands Jesus over, is the fear of a riot. He demonstrates "political skill," as they say. This is true, no doubt, but why does political skill almost always consist of giving in to violent contagion?

It is a mistake to suppose that he rejected poetry for aesthetic reasons. What is overlooked in all of this is that Plato came between an older tradition of philosophy and Christianity. He saw the danger of violence much more clearly because of his proximity to the pre-Socratics. The understanding of the danger is essential, vital in Plato.

The self-proclaimed advocate of impartiality does not want to commit himself to either course of action. If pushed toward one camp, he seeks refuge in the other. Men always find it distasteful to admit that the "reasons" on both sides of a dispute are equally valid—which is to say that violence operates without reason. Tragedy begins at that point where the illusion of impartiality, as well as the illusions of the adversaries, collapses.

Men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without the risk of abandoning themselves to it entirely. They have never had a very clear idea of this violence, and it is possible that the survival of all human societies of the past was dependent on this fundamental lack of understanding.