1,621 Quotes About Violence

Man is born violent but is kept in check by the people around him. If he nevertheless manages to throw off his fetters, he can count on applause, for everyone recognizes himself in him. Deeply ingrained, nay, buried dreams come true. The unlimited radiates its magic even upon crime, which, not coincidentally, is the main source of entertainment in Eumeswil. I, as an anarch, not uninterested but disinterested, can understand that. Freedom has a wide range and more facets than a diamond.

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.

Freedom and freedom from hunger need not be mutually exclusive. Revenge and cruelty threaten the former; greed threatens the latter. If the Government of the free, by the free and for the free wants to sustain the free State, it has to go hammer and tongs against the enemies of freedom, whether these are revengeful, cruel and violent mobs or their ideological supporters or the greedy who bleed the free so that the hungry will join the mobs.

[W]e need to acknowledge that violence begets violence. There are no violent people who were not first violated.

Police routinely shooting mentally challenged people is a very disturbing trend.

The action of forcing a conscientious objector to fight, in the name of peace or for gain, goes against their personal peace and can have unknown effects on the person and their surroundings.

Things began to go wrong when I was seventeen. My band’s twenty-year-old lead guitarist earned seven years in jail for a drug-fuelled spree of violence. The other band members were quick to let go of their musical dreams, but I never did. They did the ‘mature’ thing: after writing off the band as a teenage fantasy, they got real jobs and made some money. They called it growing up. I called it giving up.

Language, George Orwell reminds us, is always political. It can be used to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” The euphemism, he wrote, is the weapon of choice: "Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.

Alfred said more people have died in LA gang conflicts than the troubles in Ireland. You'd never thought of it like that, which is his point: no one thinks of it like that.