quotations about violence
For all who draw the sword will die by the sword.
BIBLE
Matthew 26:52
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
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
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
DAVE LAING
The Sound of Our Time
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
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
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
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that's better left unsaid.
BOB DYLAN
"Union Sundown", Infidels
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
Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Violence is an admission that one's ideas and goals cannot prevail on their own merits.
TED KENNEDY
speech, June 10, 1970
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
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
"Cowley", Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets
A little violence never hurt anybody.
BENJAMIN RUGGIERO
Donnie Brasco
All persons are selective as to the objects of their violence. For example, we swat flies, poison ants and trap or poison mice. In each of us there is a point beyond which we will forego our patience and respond in violence. That point, for each of us, depends upon our level of fear or hostility.
GENE DAVENPORT
"The inevitable outcome of violence is more violence", The Jackson Sun, April 28, 2017
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
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"
Most societies assign the task of suppressing violence by the use of violence -- to the police and the military, i.e., to the State. People who are or have been imprisoned have thereby experienced that violence. And just as in individual life, so in warfare, the violence is blamed upon the enemy. The opponent or the enemy either committed an act to which the nation or the individual responded, or acted in such a terrible way that to ignore it would have been inhuman. In the final analysis, however, the police and the soldier, by the very nature of their task, inescapably contribute to society's violence and its escalation. They are hired to do so.
GENE DAVENPORT
"The inevitable outcome of violence is more violence", The Jackson Sun, April 28, 2017
Violence as a catalyst for change is often seen as a last resort, and understandably so. Bloody, chaotic, destructive, messy -- once violence has occurred it remains with us even after its end, the images, smells and sounds associated with that moment lingering.
ELIJAH C. WATSON
"Giving Violence a Chance", Okay Player, April 28, 2017