1,621 Quotes About Violence

It is my belief that when we hurt people, we owe something, and one of the things we owe is to face what we have done. In that sense, when it comes to demanding that those who have committed wrongdoing pay that debt, there is nowhere softer on crime than prison.

Unlink masculinity from domination and violence and femininity from subordination and obedience.

Violence is not normal, it is taught, it is a symptom of insanity.

In the aftermath of harm, survivors need to locate responsibility somewhere. When the person responsible for the harm is denying (or just not openly accepting) their role, it can be common for survivors to assign that responsibility to their own actions.

Survivors are often extraordinary at metabolizing just about anything into healing.

Forms of punishment that do not include the human reckoning of accountability and the human grappling of remorse rely exclusively on extrinsic motivation— a threat from outside. One of the effects of accountability is to help foster people’s intrinsic motivation, which manifests in part as remorse.

All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.

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

She was now more than ever confronted with the outward cries of help that leaped at her like an overflowing bathtub where the water had grown cold and rancid. The catastrophe had caught up with her. It had always been there, a re-emerging siren in scarlet tones, a temptation of the abysmal artillery of the brain, a carousel waltzing with crazed horses, the heel-clicking and tap-dancing back chambers where arthropods lay on their carapaces.