Quotes About Violence

Before I met No I thought that violence meant shouting and hitting and war and blood. Now I know that there can also be violence in silence and that it’s sometimes invisible to the naked eye. There’s violence in the time that conceals wounds, the relentless succession of days, the impossibility of turning back the clock. Violence is what escapes us. It’s silent and hidden. Violence is what remains inexplicable, what stays forever opaque.

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.

There's no violence worse than the violence of Iraq. For the last fifty years Iraq has been living a nightmare of violence and terror. It's been a horrible experience and people in Iraq will need a lot of time and work to get over the disastrous effects. But first we have to think about how to stop the violence, so that the bloodshed stops. In spite of everything, on the personal level I don't easily lose hope.

My country has been wracked with violence for a long time. Just to see all the violence on the news makes you sick. It's true that violence is in our nature, but I try to explore deeply where it comes from and where it goes and what it creates. Not in a moralistic or preachy way, but just to observe the real consequences of violence in a human being or in a society.

Through TV and moving pictures a child may see more violence in thirty minutes than the average adult experiences in a lifetime. What children see on the screen is violence as an almost casual commonplace of daily living. Violence becomes the fundamental principle of society, the natural law of humanity. Killing is as common as taking a walk, a gun more natural than an umbrella. Children learn to take pride in force and to feel ashamed of ordinary sympathy. They are encouraged to forget that people have feelings.

As you become more conscious of your cruelty, of your violence, gross and subtle, you start becoming more and more compassionate. Not that you cultivate compassion. Just by becoming aware of your cruelty, violence, ugliness... the very awareness brings new changes in you. And the energy that was involved in cruelty, in violence, starts changing. The same energy becomes purified, the same energy becomes compassion.

It's often been said, "Violence never solved anything." The simple truth is that when you are slammed up against the wall and the knife is at your throat, when a circle of teenagers is kicking you as you curl into a ball on the sidewalk, or when the man walks into your office building or school with a pair of guns and starts shooting, only violence, or the reasonable threat of violence, is going to save your life. In the extreme moment, only force can stop force.

For people in neighborhoods where violence is prevalent, violence becomes a way of dealing and coping with their lives. No matter how wrong it is, violence doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people.

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

Much as being active in the antislavery movement of the last century involved more than not engaging in slavery oneself, so joining in an antiviolence movement has to go beyond opting for nonviolence in one's personal life. It calls for engaging in imaginative and forceful practices of nonviolent resistance to violence, including taking a stand toward entertainment violence.

Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit.

There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.

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

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.

Answer violence with violence. If one of us falls today, five of them must fall tomorrow.

One thing, however, is sure: unless Christians fulfill their prophetic role, unless they become the advocates and defenders of the truly poor, witness to their misery, then, infallibly, violence will suddenly break out. In one way or another 'their blood cries to heaven,' and violence will seem the only way out. It will be too late to try to calm them and create harmony.

If there is violence, it will certainly be crushed because violence can only end in a disgraceful rout.

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental non-violence. It has potency which the world does not yet know.

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.

Violence doesn't solve anything? World War I. World War II. Star Wars. Every Super Bowl. Who says violence doesn't solve anything?

The attention of the media is only caught by acts of violence... so I must perform this act of violence against myself.

Together we can decrease the level of violence, raise awareness of our activities and save lives around the world. The impact of a day of global ceasefire and non-violence cannot be underestimated.

The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.

I want to get violence - I want schools to start from K through 12 to just every day have teachers understand that they don't want to talk about anything that is violent, and they want to explain to the children how bad violence is and how behavior - violent behavior, is something that they really should not practice and think about.

Those who don't understand any language other than the language of force and violence don't respect human dignity. They seek violence because they will be irrelevant without it. We should not go their way.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

I was shooting at myself - I was shooting my own violence and the violence of the times

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

The more weapons of violence, the more misery to mankind. The triumph of violence ends in a festival of mourning.

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.

The Violence Against Women Act protects the lives of tens of thousands of domestic violence victims. But the U.S. must also support gender equality around the world, and that means acknowledging that some nations we consider to be our friends are no friends to women.

I'm far from believing that we've solved the problem of violence in the 20th century and that's why I'm not discouraged that we still have the Biafras and the Northern Irelands and the East Pakistans and, for that matter, violence in American or Canadian cities.

Capitalism, in my estimation, is not about democracy. I think we're beginning to see an understanding of this. We see it in the Black Lives Matter movement. We see it among black youth who are now struggling and trying to make connections internationally with other groups and trying to figure out what's going on in the world and the ways things like police violence and systemic violence all come together under neoliberalism.

The Violence Against Women Act is so important. It provides money to train the cop on the beat, to train the judges that this is a new day, that we won't tolerate this violence and to know how to deal with it.

If you, however, separate reason and faith so that it's purely a rationalistic scheme, it will end in violence. If a pure faith scheme - sometimes called the fundamentalist scheme in modern parlance - you'll end in violence too.

House Speaker Pelosi worried about the opposition, the tone of it, perhaps leading to violence as it did in the 70s. Theres more recent examples of anti-government violence - occurring even in the mid-90s. Do you worry about that?

Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.

How a society channels male aggression is one of the greatest questions as to whether that society will survive. That's why I am not against violence in the media, I am against the glorification of immoral violence.

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.

When I heard that one in four women is affected by domestic violence in their lifetime, I was horrified. That's why this campaign is so important. A real man is happy to support the women in his life and appreciate them. My mother and my sisters are so important to me. Violence just doesn't make any sense.

If someone can produce the law that keeps guns out of the hands of criminals but protects the right of law-abiding citizens to possess them, and doesn't infringe on those rights, I would consider that. But all the proposals I've seen do not achieve that goal. And we are missing a golden opportunity to have an important debate about violence in the USA. Violence in our society is the problem.

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

Our struggle consists in showing that our nonviolence is neither a cloak to hide our violence or hatred, nor a preparation for violence in the near or distant future.

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