Violence (quotes)

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What is violence?

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Violence is behaviour intended to hurt, damage or kill

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Violence is not always just physical

  • 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. Jiddu Krishnamurti
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The capacity for violence is in everyone

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The capacity for violence is innate in all of us …

  • There is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day. Charles Bukowski
  • Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d’être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man’s innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent. Ludwig von Mises
  • There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.  Sam Peckinpah
  • Man’s destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. Josef de Maistre
  • You can no more eradicate violence than you could eradicate love or hate or laughter…. The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.  Dan Simmons
  • You treat violence as an aberration … when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition. Dan Simmons
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… but fortunately tempered in most by kindness, co-operation and love …

  • Harvard’s Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. ‘Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,’ Kagan notes, ‘they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.’ This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, ‘is a biological feature of our species.’  Daniel Goleman
  • Kindness,  Cooperation,  Love
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… but certainly not all

  • Not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood, restless harbingers of violence and bloodshed, knowing no other path. Robert E. Howard
  • There are only three kinds of people. LEADERS. Those who take charge, build, inspire, and create. FOLLOWERS. Those who support leaders and work to achieve mutually beneficial goals…. [and] DESTROYERS. Destroyers cannot find it within themselves to follow anyone, their hatred and insecurity is too pure to see strength in any OTHER being. The utterly lack the ability to inspire or create, so they do the only thing left to them — they tear down all they come in contact with. Rick Remender
  • Like a hunter standing over his kill, men who adore violence seem to find life more beautiful dead.
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Causes of violence

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There are many causes of violence

  • Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared. Henri Nouwen
  • The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles. Mahatma Gandhi
  • As long as people use violence to combat violence, we will always have violence. Michael Berg
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Conflict can often lead to violence

  • It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race. Neale Donald Walsch
  • Conflict management
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Anger can often lead to violence

  • In certain situations, manifesting anger is the right attitude; in others it is not the right thing to manifest because it will only add to the violence. In the first case, anger unblocks the conflict and causes another to become more conscious. In the latter, it only adds to the unconsciousness and inflames the conflict. Jean-Yves Leloup
  • Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned. Dean Koontz
  • Anger
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Hatred and revenge often lead to violence

  • Revenge is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion. Albert Schweitzer
  • The hatred of those who are near to us is the most violent. Publius Cornelius Tacitus
  • Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that he’s turned it into hate. Lauren DeStefano
  • Hate,  Revenge
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Fanaticism and extremism can lead to violence

  • Fanatics in power and the funnel of a tornado have this in common – the narrow path in which they move is marked by violence and destruction. Oscar Ostlund
  • Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench. Bahá’u’lláh
  • Extremism in defense of liberty is not a vice, but I denounce political extremism, of the left or the right, based on duplicity, falsehood, fear, violence and threats when they endanger liberty. George W. Romney
  • Fanaticism is an inflamed state of the passions; and nothing that is violent will last long. The vicissitudes of the world and the business of life are admirably adapted to abate the excesses of religious enthusiasm. Robert Hall
  • Fanatacism
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Prejudice and ignorance can lead to violence

  • Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence. Hebrew Proverb
  • The most violent element in society is ignorance. Emma Goldman
  • Prejudice,  Ignorance
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Injustice often leads to violence

  • Intemperance is naturally punished with diseases; rashness, with mischance; injustice; with violence of enemies; pride, with ruin; cowardice, with oppression; and rebellion, with slaughter. Thomas Hobbes
  • Injustice
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Fear can lead to violence

  • Aggression and violence are the shadow energies of fear and impotence. Deepak Chopra
  • Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. Bertrand Russell
  • Fear
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Grief can lead to violence, but not often

  • Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence–but more generally takes the form of apathy. Joseph Conrad
  • The madness of depression is the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained. William Styron
  • Fear
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The lust for power often leads to violence

  • See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence. Noam Chomsky
  • All violence flows from the same source … the need for power. Power is the only true morality … the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment. Dan Simmons
  • 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
  • Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Mao Tse-Tung
  • Power
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Religion preaches against violence …

  • The only struggle which religions can justify, the only struggle worthy of humans, is the moral struggle against humanity’s own disordered passions, against every kind of selfishness, against attempts to oppress others, against every type of hatred and violence. Pope John Paul II
  • Perhaps the greatest contribution that those of us who come from a Christian tradition can make is to throw out the old just-war theory, embrace the nonviolence of Jesus, refuse to kill one another, and truly follow his commandment to “love our enemies. Mairead Corrigan Maguire
  • Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment, its wars. Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
  • Religion
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… but unfortunately, often causes it

  • Religion, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves “right” and others “wrong” and thus define their identity through their enemies, the “others,” the “nonbelievers” or “wrong believers” who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Eckhart Tolle
  • Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench. Bahá’u’lláh
  • These studies support our argument that fear-based religions can be hazardous to your health. It’s too bad that the Surgeon General can’t place a warning sign on certain passages from the Bible or Koran, especially those that encourage violence toward people who hold different beliefs. Andrew Newberg
  • Time and again we see leaders and members of religions incite aggression, fanaticism, hate, and xenophobia – even inspire and legitimate violent and bloody conflicts. Hans Kung
  • Man created God in his image: intolerant, sexist, homophobic and violent. Marie de France
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The price of violence

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Using violence to resolve conflict comes at a price

  • The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • In violence we forget who we are. Mary McCarthy
  • The blood of violence daunts even those with much experience of it. The splash, the spray, the drip and drizzle create infinite Rorschach patterns in every one of which the observer reads the same meaning: the fragility of his existence, the truth of his mortality. Dean Koontz
  • Conflict management
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Violence is impractical and immoral

  • Violence as a way of achieving justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed, that’s how it is surrendered. Barack Obama
  • Immorality
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Violence never leads to permanent good …

  • I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary, the evil it dose is permanent. Mahatma Gandhi
  • Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence. Mahatma Gandhi
  • Nonviolence doesn’t always work – but violence never does. Madge Micheels-Cyrus
  • Nothing good ever comes of violence. Martin Luther
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… and its victories are short lived

  • Power exercised with violence has seldom been of long duration, but temper and moderation generally produce permanence in all things. Seneca
  • Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat for it is momentary. Mahatma Gandhi
  • Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived. Abraham Lincoln
  • Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe. John Milton
  • Victory,  Defeat
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Violence rebounds against itself

  • For every force there is a counterforce. Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon itself. Lao Tzu
  • Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another. Arthur Conan Doyle
  • When violence hurries on too fast, and caution does not keep pace with revenge, people generally do themselves more harm than the enemy. Wellins Calcott
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Violence begets more violence

  • Violence begets violence by whomever used. War is a dirty business and entails the use of degrading means, whoever wages it. J. Muste
  • If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • We pay for the violence of our ancestors. Frank Herbert
  • The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral; returning violence with violence only multiplies voilence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Violence is stupidity in action

  • Violence and cruelty were just a stupid person’s way of making oneself felt, because it was easier to use your hands to strike a blow then to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to a problem. Anne Holm
  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Isaac Asimov
  • The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out. Chinese Proverb
  • Stupidity
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Violence turns us into monsters and destroys the very values we’re trying to defend

  • One simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian … one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend. William Fulbright
  • He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. Friedrich Nietzsche
  • In violence, we forget who we are. Mary Mccarthy
  • Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause. Chris Hedges
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Transcending violence

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Non-violence leads to the highest ethics

  • Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages. Alva Edison
  • 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.  Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • God is a peaceful ground of being. He is the energy of nonviolence. To ask Him to help is to ask Him to turn us into profoundly peaceful people. Marianne Williamson
  • I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of rage and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world. Joan Baez
  • 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
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Transcend violence through realising that its tired and outdated

  • We challenge the culture of violence when we ourselves act in the certainty that violence is no longer acceptable, that it’s tired and outdated no matter how many cling to it in the stubborn belief that it still works and that it’s still valid. Gerard Vanderhaar
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Transcend violence through finding creative and peaceful alternatives to aggression

  • Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict — alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence. Dorothy Thompson
  • By peace we mean the capacity to transform conflicts with empathy, without violence, and creatively – a never- ending process. Johan Galtung
  • I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct. Isaac Asimov
  • Violence is never the only, nor the right, option.
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Transcend violence through dialogue

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Transcend violence through understanding

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Transcend violence through empathy and education

  • Peace requires something far more difficult than revenge or merely turning the other cheek; it requires empathizing with the fears and unmet needs that provide the impetus for people to attack each other. Being aware of those feelings and needs, people lose their desires to attack back because they see the human ignorance leading to those attacks. Instead, their goal becomes providing the empathic connection and education that will enable them to transcend their violence and engage in cooperative relationships. Marshall Rosenberg
  • Empathy,  Education
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Transcend violence by using the brain to find just and logical solutions

  • Violence and cruelty were just a stupid person’s way of making oneself felt, because it was easier to use your hands to strike a blow then to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to a problem. Anne Holm
  • To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. Susan Sonrag
  • Logic,  Rationality,  Reason
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Transcend violence through love, gentleness and respect

  • At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love. Martin Luther King Jr.
  • I would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to fight… I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with tenderness, with nonviolence. Thích Nhất Hạnh
  • The spiritual warrior’s discipline is gentleness. Asserting gentleness in all spheres of life, non- violence and peace are achieved. Radha Sahar
  • It is clear that the way to heal society of its violence… and lack of love is to replace the pyramid of domination with the circle of equality and respect. Manitonquat
  • Love,  Gentleness,  Respect
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Transcend violence through the realisation that every living being is connected …

  • Every living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity of identification, and as its natural consequence, the practice of non-violence. Arne Naess
  • The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence – reverance for human life and the environment. William Sloan Coffin
  • Connectedness,  Oneness
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… and that violence against another is violence against yourself

  • Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of. Please be careful, Mr. Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult thing in the world to shake off. Haruki Murakami
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Transcend violence through tolerance, including self-tolerance

  • If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures. Carl Jung
  • Tolerance
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Transcend violence through appealing to the heart, not just the head

  • Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. K. Chesterton
  • Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain. Mahatma Gandhi
  • The heart
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Transcend violence through raising your consciousness

  • Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time. Deepak Chopra
  • Consciousness
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Transcend violence through finding peace inside you

  • A teacher of fear can’t bring peace on Earth. We have been trying to do it that way for thousands of years. The person who turns inner violence around, the person who finds peace inside and lives it, is the one who teaches what true peace is. We are waiting for just one teacher. You’re the one. Byron Katie
  • Inner peace
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Transcend violence through humor and levity

  • Humor offers an alternative to violence… Humor gives us a choice. William F. Fry, Jr.
  • Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. G.K. Chesterton
  • Humour,  Laughter
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Transcend violence through channeling anger into non-violent outlets

  • Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness. It takes strength to acknowledge our anger, and sometimes more strength yet to curb the aggressive urges anger may bring and to channel them into nonviolent outlets. It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings and to reach out for help and comfort when we need it. Fred Rogers
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Transcend violence through the application of justice

  • If violence is the salvation of the brutes, the salvation of man is Justice. Charles Wagner
  • Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes. Daniel Defoe
  • Justice
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Violence in our culture

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Violence has shaped and obsessed society for countless years

  • 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
  • Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid. Bob Dylan
  • Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes. Murray Edelman
  • Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted. Ellen Glasgow
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In our culture, we seem to be far more embracing of violence than sex …

  • We’re warriors, this culture, and we’re very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don’t know why that is. Mark Ruffalo
  • If you suck on a tit the movie gets an R rating. If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG.  Jack Nicholson
  • If a man is pictured chopping off a woman’s breast, it only gets a R rating, but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman’s breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness?  Sally Struthers
  • You can’t talk about fucking in America, people say you’re dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that’s cool. Richard Pryor
  • Sexuality
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… but unfortunately, they often go hand in hand

  • Physical love is unthinkable without violence. Milan Kundera
  • Sex and violence: the greatest duo since the Three Stooges. Jarod Kintz
  • Why are sex and violence always linked? I’m afraid they’ll blur together in people’s minds – sexandviolence – until we can’t tell them apart.  I expect to hear a newscaster say, “The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.  Dick Cavett
  • Violence was almost an aphrodisiac for me. Woody Harrelson
  • In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation. George Bataille
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Often, we shroud violence in justifying myths, words and lies

  • There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used…. Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness.  The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.  Gil Bailie
  • The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other. Frank Herbert
  • Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Words,  Lying
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Forms of violence

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The rush and pressure of modern life is a kind of violence

  • The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. Thomas Merton
  • Haste,  Slow down
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Needing to be right is a kind of violence

  • Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Eckhart Tolle
  • Let go of the need to be right
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Separating yourself from the rest of humankind is a kind of violence

  • When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of humankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So one who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; this person is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. Jiddu Krishnamurti
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Destroying the environment is an act of violence against nature and the planet

  • An act of violence against nature should be judged as severely as that against society or another person. Dr.Michael W.Fox
  • My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. Ursula K. Le Guin
  • A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent. F. Schumacher
  • We do need a ‘new economy,’ but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy. Wendell Berry
  • Care for the environment
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Poverty is the worst form of violence

  • Poverty is the worst form of violence. Mahatma Gandhi
  • Slow violence is seldom recognized. Hunger, poverty and injustice usually aren’t acknowledged until after the revolution.
  • Poverty
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Sometimes the cruellest violence is that which we do to ourselves

  • No amount of violence you’ve done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself. Glen Duncan
  • The violence done us by others is often less painful than that which we do to ourselves. François de la Rochefoucauld
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Some emotions, passions and impulses can be violent

  • It is difficult to say which is the greatest evil–to have too violent passions, or to be wholly devoid of them. Controlled with firmness, guided by discretion, and hallowed by the imagination, the passions are the vivifiers and quickeners of our being. Without passion there can be no energy of character. Indeed, the passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways, and dangerous only in one–through their excess. Christian Nestell Bovee
  • The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous. Aldous Huxley
  • The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves. Joseph Addison
  • A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for instinctual drives must be satisfied. Cyril Connolly
  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. Flaubert
  • Emotions,  Passion
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Violence has a role – or does it?

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Violence, some argue, has its role to play …

  • People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. George Orwell
  • In some cases nonviolence requires more militancy than violence. Cesar Chavez
  • Violence isn’t always evil. What’s evil is the infatuation with violence. Jim Morrison
  • For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted. Frantz Fanos
  • Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down. Malcolm X
  • If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again. Malcolm X
  • Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points. Leon Trotsky
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… if only as a last resort

  • Violence is my last option. Chuck Norris
  • Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose. Jean-Paul Sartre
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Violence is preferable to cowardice or impotence, especially when protecting your loved ones

  • My nonviolence does not admit of running away from danger and leaving dear ones unprotected. Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence to cowardice. I can no more preach nonviolence to a coward than I can tempt a blind man to enjoy healthy scenes. Mahatma Gandhi
  • It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence. Gandhi
  • Cowardice
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Without violence, some issues never become resolved

  • 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
  • Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor. Robert A. Heinlein
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Violence settles things, and by never threatening or applying it, our freedom would be at stake

  • 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
  • There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous. Cormac Mccarthy
  • Freedom
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Final thoughts

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Thoughts on truth and violence

  • The three stages of truth: Ridicule  2. Violent opposition  3. Acceptance
  • All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer
  • I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction. George Bataille
  • Truth
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Thoughts on war and violence

  • This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them! Albert Einstein
  • So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private citizens will occasionally kill theirs. Elbert Hubbard
  • He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill.  If he does, it is murder…. But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder.  It is just, necessary, commendable, and right.  Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent.  But how many does it take?  Adin Ballou
  • Is war necessary? Can some conflicts only be solved by violence? Human history is indeed often presented as primarily a history of wars and battles, conquests and defeats. While that is only one perspective amongst many possible ones, violence of one sort or another has certainly been, if not centre-stage, at least lurking in the wings throughout the human story. Man (especially Man, but also Woman) clearly has the propensity not only to behave aggressively to other humans but also to do so in an organized way and not infrequently with calculated cruelty. Robert Aubrey Hinde
  • It’s better to send in the Peace Corps than the Marine Corps. Ted Kennedy
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Thoughts on violence in the media

  • 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-modelling 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.
  • Children will watch anything, and when a broadcaster uses crime and violence and other shoddy devices to monopolize a child’s attention, it’s worse than taking candy from a baby. It is taking precious time from the process of growing up. Newton N. Minow
  • Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around. Dave Barry
  • You have to show violence the way it is. If you don’t show it realistically, then that’s immoral and harmful. If you don’t upset people, then that’s obscenity. Roman Polanski
  • 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. Dennis Prager
  • When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life. Joyce Carol Oates
  • Violence is one of the most fun things to watch. Quentin Tarantino
  • The media
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Thoughts on violence against children

  • If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven. George Bernard Shaw
  • When a child hits a child, we call it aggression. When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility. When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault. When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline. Haim G. Ginott
  • Never raise your hand to your children. It leaves your midsection unprotected. Robert Orben
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Thoughts on violence and liberty

  • Extremism in defence of liberty is not a vice, but I denounce political extremism, of the left or the right, based on duplicity, falsehood, fear, violence and threats when they endanger liberty. George W. Romney
  • When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her. Oscar Wilde
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On a lighter note

  • Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence. Max Amsterdam
  • By the age of 18 the average American has witnessed 200000 acts of violence on television most of them occurring during Game 1 of the NHL playoff series Steve Rushin
  • Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings. George Will
  • Great spirits often meet violent opposition with mediocre minds. Albert Einstein
  • I don’t think that violence on TV affects the viewer and I’ll break anybody’s arm says otherwise
  • I hate to advocate drugs alcohol violence or insanity to anyone but they’ve always worked for me. Hunter S. Thompson
  • American Football: It is committee meetings called huddles separated by outburst of violence.   George Will
  • It’s possible to disagree with someone about the ethics of non-violence without wanting to kick his face in. Christopher Hampton
  • Ninety-eight percent of American homes have TV sets, which means the people in the other 2% have to generate their own sex and violence. Gene Baylos
  • To describe this film as “pornographically violent” is an affront to pornography. Rubin Safaya
  • Today, watching television often means fighting, violence and foul language – and that’s just deciding who gets to hold the remote control. Donna Gephart
  • Two people fighting is not violence in hockey. It might be in tennis or bowling but it’s not in hockey. Gerry Cheevers
  • Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around. Dave Barry
  • Why are sex and violence always linked? I’m afraid they’ll blur together in people’s minds – sexandviolence – until we can’t tell them apart.  I expect to hear a newscaster say, “The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.”  Dick Cavett
  • Wrestling is ballet with violence. Jesse Ventura
  • If I have to beat you up to keep you safe, that’s just what I’ll do. It’s this kind of regard for others that makes me believe I’d be a good politician. Jarod Kintz
  • I’m a combat specialist and marriage counselor. Jarod Kintz
  • Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine- millimetre bullet. Dave Barry
  • Never raise your hand to your children. It leaves your midsection unprotected. Robert Orben
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