quotations about violence
The message I want to send is that domestic violence is widespread in our community, it's not limited to the poor, it happens in middle class families, rich families.
CANDICE PROSSER
"Domestic violence can happen to anyone, Adelaide lawyer warns", ABC Online, April 20, 2017
I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation
What I didn't know was that violence wears disguises. And the first time you made fun of me in front of someone I never saw it as the beginning of something bigger.... You never hit me, and that was why I stayed, because I couldn't believe what I couldn't label: what I didn't know was that what you did was far worse, stripping me of feelings and thoughts and my sense of self.
JEANNETTE ANGELL
"What I Didn't Know", Full of Crow, October 2009
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
DAVE LAING
The Sound of Our Time
The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.
GIL BAILIE
Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
A little violence never hurt anybody.
BENJAMIN RUGGIERO
Donnie Brasco
Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
The blood of violence daunts even those with much experience of it. The splash, the spray, the drip and drizzle create infinite Rorschach patterns in every one of which the observer reads the same meaning: the fragility of his existence, the truth of his mortality.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
Violence is an admission that one's ideas and goals cannot prevail on their own merits.
TED KENNEDY
speech, June 10, 1970
This violence exceeds his virtuous mien,
Like swelling tides that overcome their shore,
Leaving the lawful current of their stream,
And break their banks that bounded them before;
Yet grief in his great violence is more;
For if that reason bound not grief with laws,
In our destruction grief will be the cause.
CHRISTOPHER LEVER
attributed, A Cyclopædia of Sacred Poetical Quotations
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that's better left unsaid.
BOB DYLAN
"Union Sundown", Infidels
This is what "original sin" means to me -- not that we inherit guilt, but that our world is so immersed in violence that we can't help but participate in it.
LINDSAY PARIS-LOPEZ
"Are We Really Ready for New Life in Christ?", Sojourners, April 28, 2017
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
LEO TOLSTOY
The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
Violence is man re-creating himself.
FRANTZ FANON
The Wretched of the Earth
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Young India, May 21, 1925
Return not violence for violence.
ABU HANIFA
attributed, Day's Collacon
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
"Cowley", Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets
The slaughter he had just witnessed struck him as abysmally repetitive of a great deal of recent history, and he did not wish to belong to that history anymore.
MICHAEL BISHOP
"The Quickening"
The only thing to do with atrocity, it's been said, is to chronicle it. There's no working it, shaping it, making art of it. Just history's obligation to document the facts.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer