Quotes About Violence

We are convinced that non-violence is more powerful than violence. We are convinced that non-violence supports you if you have a just and moral cause...If you use violence, you have to sell part of yourself for that violence. Then you are no longer a master of your own struggle.

...people think non-violence is really weak and non-militant. These are misconceptions that people have because they don't understand what non-violence means. Non-violence takes more guts, if I can put it bluntly, than violence. Most violent acts are accomplished by getting the opponent off guard, and it doesn't take that much character, I think, if one wants to do it.

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.

Domestic violence can be so easy for people to ignore, as it often happens without any witnesses and it is sometimes easier not to get involved. Yet, by publicly speaking out against domestic violence, together we can challenge attitudes towards violence in the home and show that domestic violence is a crime and not merely unacceptable.

It is no solution to define words as violence or prejudice as oppression, and then by cracking down on words or thoughts pretend that we are doing something about violence and oppression. No doubt it is easier to pass a speech code or hate-crimes law and proclaim the streets safer than actually to make the streets safer, but the one must never be confused with the other... Indeed, equating "verbal violence" with physical violence is a treacherous, mischievous business.

Personally, I can't stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there's 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don't know why those directors aren't asked why they're such specialists for violence.

The question is no longer between violence and non-violence it is between non-violence and non-existence.

I think it's likely that the civilizing effect of literature has done most of the work, and still continues to do. Look at Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It proves beyond any shadow of doubt that violence has declined dramatically throughout the centuries. There are various reasons for it: the rise of the state, Leviathan, the monopoly of violence, children's rights, animal rights. They're all positive signs.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.

No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!

I do find violence entertaining, but that doesn't make me a bad person. I grew up watching all these action films when I was a kid. My dad would bring back 'Rambo' and whatever, and we'd watch it together. It's not affected me in any way other than I just appreciate the entertainment value of violence on film.

To cure the violence, we must identify and heal the causes of hatred and violence. If we dont deal with the causes we will never be safe.

Violence will prevail over violence, only when someone can prove to me that darkness can be dispelled by darkness

Although violence and the use of force may appear powerful and decisive, their benefits are short-lived. Violence can never bring a lasting and long term resolution to any problem, because it is unpredictable and for every problem it seems to solve, others are created. On the other hand, truth remains constant and will ultimately prevail.

Films don't cause violence, people do. Violence defines our existence. To shield oneself is more dangerous than trying to reflect it.

Our position was: If you don't attack us, there won't be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves.

We're fascinated by things that scare us, and one of the things that scares us is violence. Violence exists. It's a real part of our lives. We are obsessed with what we're scared of, but it certainly doesn't define us.

[I]t's impossible to evade the fact that Endless War will inevitably degrade the citizenry of the country that engages in it. A country which venerates its military above all other institutions, which demands that its soldiers be spoken of only with religious-like worship, and which continuously indoctrinates its population to believe that endless violence against numerous countries is necessary and just - all by instilling intense fear of the minorities who are the target of that endless violence - will be a country filled with citizens convinced of the virtues and nobility of aggression.

All the fear in the world, and the violence that comes from the fear, and the hatred that comes from the violence, and the lonliness that comes from the hatred. All the unhappiness, all the cruelty, it gathers like clouds in the air, and grows dark and cold and heavy, and falls like grey snow in thick layers over the land. Then the world is muffled and numb, and no one can hear each other or feel each other. Think how sad and lonely that must be.

Nearly one in four women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime. And slightly more than half of female victims of domestic violence live in households with children under age 12.

In the secret of my heart I am in perpetual quarrel with God that He should allow such things [as the war] to go on. My non-violence seems almost impotent. But the answer comes at the end of the daily quarrel that neither God nor non-violence is impotent. Impotence is in men. I must try on without losing faith even though I may break in the attempt.

As a Mark brand ambassador, I became extremely cognizant of the devastating statistics about dating abuse and partner violence via the mPowerment campaign and knew I wanted to help change those statistics. mPowerment by Mark and the Avon Foundation for Women funded the No More study, which explored dating abuse, partner violence, and sexual assault. I was honored to be part of it and report the results of the survey in a Capitol Hill briefing.

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

As a Goodwill Ambassador for UNIFEM, I've learned that violence against women knows no boundaries. Join me in helping women worldwide who have suffered unthinkable violence.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

Relationship is the mirror: see your face there. Always remember relationship is the mirror. If your meditation is going deep, your relationship will become different - totally different. Love will be the basic note of your relationship, not violence. As it is, violence is the basic note. Even if you look at someone, you look in a violent way. But we are accustomed to it.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

As a mode of public pedagogy, a state of permanent war needs willing subjects to abide by its values, ideology, and narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through a market-driven culture addicted to the production of consumerism, militarism and organized violence, largely circulated through various registers of popular culture that extend from high fashion and Hollywood movies to the creation of violent video games and music concerts sponsored by the Pentagon.

Violence doesn't seem to bother people anymore - they're inured to it. And I think it has a lot to do with the violence in movies and video games - it doesn't bother people as much. I'm not so sure it evokes a reaction anymore.

If you live in a society where those who govern society and determine its path do not respect freedom of speech and freedom of religion, freedom of choice, freedom of assembly, and if there is no democratic process and no way to change the order of things by reason and peace and love and so on, and if, as a result of that, certain ideas in which you believe are being crushed, then I think the only way you can defend yourself against this violence is in using violence of your own.

If the numbers we see in domestic violence were applied to terrorism or gang violence, the entire country would be up in arms, and it would be the lead story on the news every night.

Violence is so terribly fast . . . the most perverse thing about the movies is the way they portray it in slow motion, allowing it to be something sensuous . . . the viewer's lips slightly wet as the scene plays out. Violence is nothing like that. It is lightning fast, chaotic, and totally intangible.

Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.

It is our responsibility as the stronger party [Israel], as the occupying power, to convince the Palestinians that they can achieve their basic national aims, their just national aspirations, without violence. Unfortunately, the behavior of the Sharon administration, and before this of the Barak administration, has shown the Palestinians the opposite: namely, that they will achieve nothing without violence.

We all come from different levels, and I think every human has their own relationship to violence, athletic violence and fighting.

Men often prove the violence of their own prejudices, even by the violence with which they attack the prejudices of other people.

The most brutal form of domestic violence is the violence against unborn children, and this particular bill would prohibit abortions after the fetus feels pain, which is 20 weeks and older.

When a rap song glorifies violence, death and sadness and loss is inflicted because of the violence.

State violence cannot be defined simply as a political issue but also as a pedagogical issue that wages violence against the minds, desires, bodies and identities of young people as part of the reconfiguration of the social state into the punishing state.

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.

To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.

Coalition forces have encountered serious violence in some areas of Iraq. Our military commanders report that this violence is being insticated by three groups.

Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

Another bigger problem is the fact that these incidents of police violence continue to occur because far too often the officers on the force rally around the one who committed the act of violence and, in this particular instance, may have engaged in a cover-up that itself should be prosecuted.

Violence has been a necessary component of every serious liberation struggle...Violence is not the only path to liberation, but likely an indispensable one...the Press Office would like to be clear on this matter: we support all the liberationists ­ from the graffiti artists and ALF liberator to the Animal Rights Militia, Justice Department and Revolutionary Cells.