 
|
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.
-Hannah Arendt
|
|
|
|
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
-Hannah Arendt
|
|
|
|
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
-Isaac Asimov
Salvor Hardin in Foundation
|
|
|
|
Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
-J. G. Ballard
|
|
|
|
I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.
-Edward Bond
|
|
|
|
Who has not hoped
To outrage an enemy's dignity?
Who has not been swept
By the wish to hurt?
And who has not thought that the impersonal world
Deserves no better than to be destroyed
By one fabulous sign of his displeasure?
-Jacob Bronowski
The Face of Violence
|
|
|
|
They are not following dharma who resort to violence to achieve their purpose. But those who lead others through nonviolent means, knowing right and wrong, may be called guardians of the dharma.
-Buddha
|
|
|
|
We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
-Anthony Burgess
|
|
|
|
Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
|
|
|
|
Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money, admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity. In male culture, police are heroic and so are outlaws; males who enforce standards are heroic and so are those who violate them.
-Andrea Dworkin
|
|
|
|
I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence....I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour.But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment. Forgiveness adorns a soldier...But abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish; it is meaningless when it pretends to proceed from a helpless creature....But I do not believe India to be helpless....I do not believe myself to be a helpless creature....Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
-Mahatma Gandhi, August 11, 1920
|
|
|
|
It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.
-Mahatma Gandhi
|
|
|
|
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
-Mahatma Gandhi
|
|
|
|
Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
-Ellen Glasgow
Letters of Ellen Glasgow
|
|
|
|
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
-Salvor Hardin
|
|
|
|
Violence was almost an aphrodisiac for me.
-Woody Harrelson
|
|
|
|
Those who cling to the untrue doctrine that violence never settles anything would be advised to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
-Robert A. Heinlein
|
|
|
|
Cause a man with a briefcase can steal more money than any man with a gun
-Don Henley
|
|
|
|
There are situations in life to which the only satisfactory response is a physically violent one. If you don't make that response, you continually relive the unresolved situation over and over in your life.
-Russell Hoban
|
|
|
|
The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Trumpet of Conscience
|
|
|
|
A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.
-Lewis H. Lapham
|
|
|
|
In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.
-Joseph De Maistre
|
|
|
|
If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.
-Malcolm X
|
|
|
|
The impact of violent video games upon children is not as clearly established as the impact of violent television programming. Young children possess an instinctive desire to imitate actions they observe, without always possessing the intellect or maturity to determine if such actions are appropriate. Due to their role-modeling capacity to promote real world violence, there is deep concern that playing violent video games, with their fully digitized human images, will cause children to become more aggressive toward other children and become more tolerant of, and more likely to engage in, real-life violence.
-Robert E. McAfee, MD., In testimony before House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance in June 1994.
|
|
|
|
In violence we forget who we are.
-Mary McCarthy
|
|
Books about Violence
