c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There is no such thing as a "just" war. It's just war. And it's antithetical to the Gospel.
— David D. Flowers
Eastward and westward storms are breaking,--great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois
It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.
— Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo
Other girls play with soft toys,” I said, “and you play with knives…
— Jess C. Scott, Playmates
The purpose of bayonet training is to awaken your killer instincts. The killer instinct will make you strong. If the meek ever inherit the earth the strong will take it away from them. The weak exist to be devoured by the strong. Every Marine must pack his own gear. Every Marine must be the instrument of his own salvation.
— Stanley Kubrick
How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The answer is simple: this arrogant individual, whose power of authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficulty remembering he was once a man; he thinks he is a whip or a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferior races" is obtained by governing their reflexes. He disregards the human memory, the indelible reminders; and then, above all, there is this that perhaps he never know: we only become what we are by radically negating deep down what others have done to us.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wretched of the Earth
Despite our earnest efforts, we couldn't climb all the way up to God. So what did God do? In an amazing act of condescension, on Good Friday, God climbed down to us, became one with us. The story of divine condescension begins on Christmas and ends on Good Friday. We thought, if there is to be business between us and God, we must somehow get up to God. Then God came down, down to the level of the cross, all the way down to the depths of hell. He who knew not sin took on our sin so that we might be free of it. God still stoops, in your life and mine, condescends. “Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” he asked his disciples, before his way up Golgotha. Our answer is an obvious, “No!” His cup is not only the cup of crucifixion and death, it is the bloody, bloody cup that one must drink if one is going to get mixed up in us. Any God who would wander into the human condition, any God who has this thirst to pursue us, had better not be too put off by pain, for that's the way we tend to treat our saviors. Any God who tries to love us had better be ready to die for it. As Chesterton writes, “Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate … Real love has always ended in bloodshed.
— William H. Willimon, Thank God It's Friday: Encountering the Seven Last Words from the Cross
Violence and cruelty were just a stupid person's way of making himself felt, because it was easier to use your hands to strike a blow than use your brain to find a logical and just solution to a problem.
— Anne Holm, I Am David
As a product of Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture, I am familiar with its centuries-old tradition of hiding its abuse of women under pretty packaging.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
Is racial violence is the answer for happened racial violence? Which planet am I? Where are the people who taught me there is no difference? Why? 
— Csaba Gabor-B.
A bullet leaves evidence that a mortar doesn't.
— Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo
Private ownerships of a ...slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.
— Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood
Guns are like thermometers, only instead of measuring body temperatures they measure our fear.
— Jean Zimmerman, Savage Girl
Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
The worst kind of tyrant is one that is righteously wrong
— rassool jibraeel snyman
He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often.
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
He'd been a fool, he saw that now. How could he have thought, even for a minute, that they'd be safe out here in the suburbs? The world was violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you worked for, everything you loved, had to be locked up as if you were in a castle under siege.
— T.C. Boyle, If the River Was Whiskey
Unfortunately, violence has a way of overpowering even the strongest of wills
— Kenneth Eade, Predatory Kill
There are spiritual laws at work that most people know nothing about. So when others hurt us, our tendency is to strike back because we assume that we must defend ourselves, defend our name, our honor, our career, and so on. In reality we strike back at ourselves. ... What we consider as justifiable defense of our rights may in reality plunge us into a vicious cycle that can undermine our very spiritual foundation. By reacting to aggression with aggression we lose the opportunity to spiritually benefit from the experience. this law also explains why saints, when hit, often would literally turn the other cheek. (Fr. Maximos)
— Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality
Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects. They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man's life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
To cope, he and his siblings – older and younger sisters, a younger brother - created a game called Henry Kissinger. Palahniuk remembers that as their parents fought, lots would be drawn to see who would play Kissinger. 'This was the early to mid-70s, when Kissinger was a hero, forging peace in the Middle East,' he explains. 'Whoever became Henry Kissinger would have to go and redirect our parents’ attention or anger to a different crisis.' The child who drew the short straw would severely hurt himself, presenting himself as 'this injured thing' in an effort to diffuse conflict.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mouth
I felt like the end of an A-Team episode when everything worked out, and the heroes all got to go home and live happily ever after while the bad guys were put in jail. Except of course, I was the bad guy.Whatever.
— Shay Savage, Otherwise Occupied
I was remarkably calm. Calm and fatigued. There would be no violence. It was like a storm coming up. The café chairs are carried inside, the awnings are rolled up, but nothing happens. The storm passes over. And, at the same time, that’s too bad. After all, we would all rather see the roofs ripped from the houses, the trees uprooted and tossed through the air.
— Herman Koch, The Dinner
Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and pu the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, head, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Isn't it amazing that, historically, the "Prince of Peace" has most often been introduced to new cultures through extreme violence? European and American colonialists bring this disparity to light in a way that makes me wish that forced conversion didn't work so extraordinarily well.
— David G. McAfee
The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing.
— Joseph Conrad
It were indeed to be wish'd that our art had been less ingenious, in contriving means destructive to mankind; we mean those instruments of war, which were unknown to the ancients, and have made such havoc among the moderns. But as men have always been bent on seeking each other's destruction by continual wars; and as force, when brought against us, can only be repelled by force; the chief support of war, must, after money, be now sought in chemistry.
— Hermann Boerhaave
It is my assertion, however, that the project of remaking humanity and defining identity has been at the core of this century, and that much of this project was characterized by a tremendous destructive urge followed by a long and as yet uncompleted process of coming to terms with the disasters it has produced and is still producing in many parts of the world.
— Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity
Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers.
— Elie Wiesel, Night
Things keep happening all around you. There is violence, there is gore, there are people who will use you and never look back to see what became of you, and worse, there are people who will break you into smithereens before they leave to make sure they don’t have to look back to see what became of you.
— Heema Shirvaikar, Uff Ye Emotions 2
When men in power decide that things need to be rebalanced at any cost, the violence is never brief and never really directed solely at the imbalance that supposedly inspired it. The rule of law becomes the rule of violence. Revenge becomes a synonym for justice. No city is safe from such horror, no nation, no time in all of history. Be ready to recognize the moment. Be always ready.
— Dean Koontz, Innocence
The desire to be loved, to feel loved, is behind every diet, pill, surgery, and lie. It is behind each act of violence and every affair as well as each organized religion and every method of self-help.
— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset: An Unconventional Guide to Healing and Happiness
Generally speaking, by the way, that is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts.
— Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
It’s comforting to me,” he added, “that beauty can come from violence, if only in metaphor.
— Keith Hollihan, The Four Stages of Cruelty: A Novel
If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.
— Joseph Rotblat
There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.
— Julian Barnes, Talking It Over
I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats
— Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
Any one war seems rooted in its antecedents.
— T.H. White, The Candle in the Wind
Go that way, past the viaduct, and the wops will jump you, or chase you into Jew town...Polacks would stomp on you...Micks will shower you with Irish confetti from the brickyards.
— Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago
He had conquered murder only to be faced with war. There were no laws for that.
— T.H. White, The Candle in the Wind
Nausea and panic rose in my throat. I had killed a man.
— A.B. Shepherd, The Beacon
Education about gender and peace is important. Educational strategies to promote peace must consider all relations of dominance.
— Widad Akreyi
They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
— Howard Zinn
In the system of chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection relationship which [organized crime] established with small businesses in the early part of this century. Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which depends for its existence on rape.
— Susan Griffin, Rape: The Politics of Consciousness
These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs which is among the most potent causes for the current world-wide rebellious unrest.
— Hannah Arendt, On Violence
A day came when I should have died,and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
And then I heard the ring of metal on concrete, and I went cold, because one of them had found a piece of rebar lying around, and I knew with sudden certainty that these guys were going to kill me right here on this stupid sidewalk, for nothing, without even the reason of knowing my name or hating my politics. They were just going to kill me because they needed to kill something, and I was handy. At least zombies would have had a reason.
— Rachel Caine, Fall of Night
I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.
— J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
Ciba: "I thought you were supposed to be some big brave war hero. What about that goddamn gold star you polish every night?"Natalya: "You know what this shiny piece of tin is, you fucking space cadet? It's the way stupid boys trick other stupid boys into dying for bullshit causes ... and I'm done acting like one of them.
— Brian K. Vaughan, Y: The Last Man - The Deluxe Edition Book Four
We can’t answer King’s assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.
— Sammy Davis Jr.
Only victors have stories to tell,we the vanquished were then thought ofas cowards and weaklings whose memoriesand fears should not be remembered.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
Don’t you understand that freedom depends upon the continuing possibility of rebel violence. When violence becomes unthinkable, freedom dies…
— Samuel B. Southwell, If All the Rebels Die
You hardly asked if I was okay the entire time we were together.” (Jessie)“Okay? You wanted me to ask you if you were okay? Jessie, I saw you! How could I think for one second you were okay? Do you think it’s normal for me to watch a girl being raped from the roof? But I was there, loaded down with enough guns to do some serious damage. And what did I do about it? Nothing. Because I could do nothing, because my sole goal was to get you safely out of there. So I sat and watched it… for hours. I let them do that to you. I heard you. I saw you. And eventually, I had to turn away. I couldn’t watch it. It was that bad. I know why you’re not okay. I don’t have to ask why.” (Will)
— Leanne Davis, The Other Sister
It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of “religious violence,” we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence.
— Jack David Eller, Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence Across Culture and History
Violence is the tool of the barbarian; aggression is the method of the primitive; bloodshed is the way of the savage; cruelty is the manner of the brutish! To be called as a ‘civilised,’ man must be peaceable!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Here was the love and violence in the hearts of men, all for their women
— Hugh Howey, Shift
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Why fight to the death when we can love eachother to death?
— Sigurd Bache Hungnes
The poker fell from my trembling hands as my entire body shook with reaction. I fell to my knees, pressed my hands to my face and began to sob. What had I done?
— A.B. Shepherd, The Beacon
When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
I shook my head. "I'm good, Nicky helped."Nicky looked at Edward. "She's having one of those what-if-killing-feels-really-good, doesn't-that-make-me-a-bad-person moments." Edward nodded as if that made perfect sense. "Then it feels good. We can't really control what flips our switch; don't judge it, Anita, and just accept it."I wanted to argue, but it would have been beyond stupid to argue with the two sociopaths in my life. "Why do I have moral quandary questions with the two of you?""Because you don't really have moral quandaries about violence, Anita, but you're afraid of being judged for enjoying it, so you only bring it to the two people in your life who won't judge you." I wanted to argue with Edward, but I couldn't. "Well, fuck.
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Affliction
Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.
— Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind's extreme dissociation is that each ego state is totally without knowledge of the other. Because of this, the researchers for the CIA and the Department of Defense believed they could take a personality, train him or her to be a killer and no other ego stares would be aware of the violence that was taking place. The personality running the body would be genuinely unaware of the deaths another personality was causing. Even torture could not expose the with, because the personality experiencing the torture would have no awareness of the information being sought. Earlier, such knowledge was gained from therapists working with adults who had multiple personalities. The earliest pioneers in the field, such as Dr. Ralph Alison, a psychiatrist then living in Santa Cruz, California, were helping victims of severe early childhood trauma. Because there were no protocols for treatment, the pioneers made careful notes, publishing their discoveries so other therapists would understand how to help these rare cases. By 1965, the information was fairly extensive, including the knowledge that only unusually intelligent children become multiple personalities and that sexual trauma endured by a restrained child under the age of seven is the most common way to induce hysteric dissociation.
— Lynn Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.
— Jacob Appelbaum, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.
— Aberjhani, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois
Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn’t done anything wrong, wasn’t even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn’t stop. And when I finally did stop, I’d expended all this energy and frustration, and I’m thinking what in God’s sweet name did I do.
— Gail A. Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, And Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry
If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.
— J.D. Salinger, The Complete Uncollected Stories
Violence is avoided, when we sit down with others, and discuss issues, and work together for solutions.
— Ellen J. Barrier
Where a person has no control, he will turn to violence; either to attain control, or as an alternative to it.
— Charlie Herrick
From their perspective, however, torture might make a sort of cockeyed sense if it was ritualistic, part of a ceremony that this fraternity of the demented required of themselves when they murdered one of their own.
— Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd
What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and those below cowered and, if they were not quick enough, were spattered in blood. Then came the jolt, as of a fall, and I saw the leg was caught in an ungainly way in the smaller branches of a mutamba tree, the foot hooked, long like that infamous fruit.
— Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not
The absolute defining moment of my life was the day the drug deal went bad. It started out just like any other day, at least for the girlfriend of a dealer. However, this time, it went bad. Really bad.
— Valerie Fries Wade, Memoirs of Dakini: True Confessions of a Former Flower Child
...so much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty, and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating and destructive effect upon society than the others.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
When my trust was suspended from the fragile thread of justice and in the whole city they were chopping up my heart's lanterns when they would blindfold me with the dark handkerchief of Law and from my anxious temples of desire fountains of blood would squirt out when my life had become nothing nothing but the tic-tac of a clock, I discovered I must must must love, insanely.
— فروغ فرخزاد
Clearly there are common sense things we can do to help children to have better lives and keep them from becoming so despondent that their only perceived solution is to kill themselves or others. How oblivious do we have to be to the inner turmoil of our own children to not see what they're going through, and then suggest when they completely snap with homicidal violence, it must've been the video games?
— Edward M. Wolfe, Fun & Games & Mass Murder
Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued violence, so the army is present. There would be no contradiction in that, if terror reigned everywhere in the world, but the colonizer enjoys, in the mother country, democratic rights that the colonialist system refuses to the colonized native. In fact, the colonialist system favors population growth to reduce the cost of labor, and it forbids assimilation of the natives, whose numerical superiority, if they had voting rights, would shatter the system. Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition. Racism is ingrained in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonialist methods of production and exchange. Political and social regulations reinforce one another. Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is abandoned without protection to inhuman forces - brought in with the colonialist praxis, engendered every moment by the colonialist apparatus, and sustained by relations of production that define two sorts of individuals - one for whom privilege and humanity are one, who becomes a human being through exercising his rights; and the other, for whom a denial of rights sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in general, 'subhumanity.
— Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized
Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?
— Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book
Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.
— Rudolf Rocker
For the Wife Beater's WifeWith blue irises her face is blossomed. BlueCircling to yellow, circling to brown on her cheeks.The long bone of her jaw untrackedShe hides in our kitchen.He sleeps it off next door.Her chicken legs tucked under herShe's frantic with lies, animatedBefore the swirling smoke.On her cigarette she leaves red prints, redLike a cut on the white cup.Like a skin she pulls her sweater around her.She's cold,She brings the cold in with her.In our kitchen she hides.He sleeps it off next door, his greatBelly heaving with booze.Again and again she tells the storyAs if the details ever changed,As if blows to the face were somehowDifferent beating to beating.We reach for her but can't help.She retreats into her cold love of himAnd looks across the table at usAs if across a sea.Next door he claws out of sleep.She says she thinks she'll do somethingAfter all, with her hair tonight.
— Bruce Weigl
We are all artificial and have been unnaturally changed by violence and unwholesome conditioning.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Modern consumer life is a form of extreme passive violence against all people.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
When the battle is over, the winners find it very hard not to pursue their violence. If you are strong enough to hold violence, you are strong enough to hold true to your pact. Then you have more moral fiber than most adults. Free will is one of the pillars of being human.
— Alan McCluskey, Boy & Girl
Guy Boy Man," says Baby Doll15. "Violence is not the answer."I look down the hallway, steely eyed. "Then I don't like the question." Sweetie and I high five.
— James   Marshall, Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies
A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watcha Christ go up in flames, smiling,as if he were a hookedfish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned.His charred bodygives off light--a haloburns out of him. His face is scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip,another with his armslung over the shoulder of a friend,as if this moment were large enoughto hold affection.
— Toi Derricotte
There just seems to be too much violence everywhere, even the news can't help break now and then on TV
— Nikhil Sharda
One of these days I'm gonna beat him in the face with the butt of my service revolver until an eyeball pops out. These are the thoughts that keep me happy.
— John Layman, Chew, Vol. 3: Just Desserts
I was not frightened as they were, for the very violence of his threats showed how weak he was.
— Erik Christian Haugaard, The Little Fishes
Allah-U-Akbar (God is great) is the most frightening word, because it always reminds me that someone is committing crime;specifically murder.
— M.F. Moonzajer
The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.
— Mark  Lawrence, King of Thorns
GUNS ARE NOT THE ISSUE. WE ARE.
— Aaron B. Powell, Guns
You don't get it boy... this isn't a mudhole... its an operating table. (KRAKKKKK) And I'm the surgeon.
— Frank Miller, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.
— Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
We must realize that violence is not confined to physical violence. Fear is violence, caste discrimination is violence, exploitation of others, however subtle, is violence, segregation is violence, thinking ill of others and condemning others are violence. In order to reduce individual acts of physical violence, we must work to eliminate violence at all levels, mental, verbal, personal, and social, including violence to animals, plants, and all other forms of life.
— Satish Kumar, The Buddha and the Terrorist
..each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.
— Bill Clinton
We'd be the safest country in the world if the world knew we didn't have a gun. Men are not killed because they get mad at each other. They're killed because one has a gun.
— Jeannette Rankin
Intolerance is a species of violence and therefore against our creed.
— Mahatma Gandhi, The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi
And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that veck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Control is violence
—  cooperation is friendship.
The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.
— George Orwell, 1984
Chase asks her what time the appointment is booked for. Rachel says, "It's at 11:30 or midnight. He's supposed to call to confirm." She checks her cell. "But I want to be there early." she says."Why?""Just to be on the safe side.""There isn't one, Rachel.
— Joe McGinniss Jr., The Delivery Man
All violence demands reform, and all violence desperately begs to be healed.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
I admit to a feeling of pride that my father had saved the day yet again, although I also thought that nothing would have been better for me personally than for the mullah to force my father's departure within the hour. Either way, I know now that nothing would have stopped my father from his Jihad. If he could not remain in Afghanistan, he would go to Pakistan. If Pakistan pulled the welcome mat, he would go to Yemen. If Yemen threw him out, he would journey to the middle of the most hostile desert where he would plot against the West. Violent Jihad was my father's life; nothing else really mattered. Nothing.
— Omar bin Laden, Growing Up bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
Since the human mind is the primary weapon of the human being, it is also therefore the primary and most significant instrument of violence.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
We are all a part of a culture of violence that dominates every aspect of our lives.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
He'd shot and beaten people because he couldn't talk to them.Violence was the only language nobody could understand. There were no translators.
— James Meek, The People's Act of Love
But strength doesn’t always mean brute force. You don’t have to kick ass to be a fighter. Violence doesn’t equal strength. Lead your army by example. There’s a better answer to all this. War isn’t going to solve anything, but it will tear our two worlds apart, and there will be casualties, including humans. There’s nothing heroic about this war. It will lead to a destruction unlike anything you or I have ever seen
— Becca Fitzpatrick, Finale
We owe our children – the most vulnerable citizens in any society – a life free from violence and fear.
— Nelson Mandela
Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn’t murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate. It is always a descending spiral leading nowhere. This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multiplies evil and violence in the universe. It doesn’t solve any problems.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use violence to get what they want.
— Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living
People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, but they do not know how to, because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. . . . We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in our whole culture -- in the theater of cruelty, in the violence in the streets, in the death of man in art and life.
— Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason: A Penetrating Analysis of Trends in Modern Thought
All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ... , the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.
— Francis A. Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
Remember, I'm the only person her who's paid to be nice to you. But not too nice. Give me any lip and I'll break your face. OK?
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
H.I.V.E. will not tolerate unauthorized violence between students, especially students that have only been here for a matter of hours.""I was just introducing myself," Otto replied innocently. "I'm afraid I appear to have inadvertently offended them somehow.
— Mark Walden, H.I.V.E. Higher Institute of Villainous Education
Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist--holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew--moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.
— Zsuzsi Gartner, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
We're this big melting pot, but someone turned up the heat too high, and the stew started to burn. Gangs, crime, fights, and fear are now a regular part of our local stew.
— Neal Shusterman, Red Rider's Hood
It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.
— John Fowles, The Collector
I don’t get you people. You watch the Godfather on television and tons of people are getting shot and stabbed to death, blood splattering everywhere and it is entertaining. But, when they killed a horse, people were outraged.
— Mario Stinger, Destined for Oblivion: As Nature Intended
Revolutionary behavior and violence are usually only indulged in when people are at their wits’ end. So social stability depends a lot on how long their wits are.
— George Hammond
Never on me let such wrath lay hold, as the wrath you cherish, you whose valor causes harm!
— Augustus Taber Murray, Homer: Iliad II, Books 13-24
With tybo men there isn't much difference between fucking and killing.
— Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
It is a terrible thing to witness death by violence, a thousand times worse to hold a man’s life in your own hands and to willingly, consciously take it from him. Acknowledged or not, something noble has been scoured from your insides, never to be replaced. You saved a friend’s life, and there lies ample justification. But never peace, never balance, never the same. At least that is how it seems to me.
— Andrew Levkoff, A Mixture of Madness
Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up?
— Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love
Never scorn a woman. They get violent.
— Pepper Phillips, The Devil Has Dimples
In light of all the gun violence in the USA, I'd prefer my democracy unleaded.
— Jayseth Guberman
I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.
— George R.R. Martin
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.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
If anyone hits me, they can expect to be hit back, and harder. I never turn the other cheek because in my experience that doesn’t work.
— Alice Bag
Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.
— William T. Vollmann
Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.
— Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
There is nothing more pathetically sad than a parent who teaches a child not to hit by spanking them. Well, that, and adults who think hitting someone will solve a problem.
— Anitra Lynn McLeod, Saving a Fallen Mate
Violence and cruelty were just a stupid person's way of making himself 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, I Am David
They had come for us in the night. Hey had come expecting a lot of blood. They had come with all their gear. Their rubber overshoes and their nylon bodysuits. Their knives, their hammer, their bag of nails. They had come to do a job on us, like they'd done on Morrison and his wife.
— Lee Child, Killing Floor
He soon recognized the fact that the stimulus proceeded from the idea to be in the power of a woman rather than from the act of violence itself.
— Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories
In answer to 'But violence hasn't solved anything!'The hell it hasn't. The application of violence - of killing and a willingness to be killed - on a massive scale is responsible for a lot of solutions. The most recent mass application of violence liberated Kuwait. The most recent mass application of violence on a global scale alone cleansed the world of the Third Reich. Nonviolence and passive resistance did less than nothing to stop Hitler and his henchmen. The Atlantic slave trade wasn't stopped by 'dialogue' or 'passive resistance' or conferences, but by the opened gunports of the Royal Navy; Dachau and Chang-I weren't liberated with pamphlets.
— Markham Shaw Pyle
CRUEL HARVEST by Fran Elizabeth Grubb is a compelling, riveting, unforgetable memoir that will keep you turning the pages. Published by Thomas Nelson and due for release August 2012. Kidnapped from an orphanage Frances is dragged across the country working in the fields. Youtubefrangrubb to see video book trailer.
— Fran Elizabeth Grubb
Very slowly using two fingers, Annabeth drew her dagger. Instead of dropping it, she tossed it as far as she could into the w
— Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers.
— Maya Angelou
You'll find that life is still worthwhile, if you just smile.
— Charlie Chaplin
A smile is the best way to get away with trouble even if it’s a fake one.
— Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 01: The Tests of the Ninja
In the fairy tales, the poor girl smiles when she becomes a princess. Right now, I don't know if I'll ever smile again.
— Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
it's a smile, it's a kiss, it's a sip of wine ... it's summertime!
— Kenny Chesney
Smiling is confusing, she thought. This is why I don’t do it.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
The groom always smiles proudly because he's convinced he's accomplished something quite wonderful. The bride smiles because she's been able to convince him of it.
— Judith McNaught, A Kingdom of Dreams
I like it when my mother smiles. And I especially like it when I make her smile.
— Adriana Trigiani, Viola in Reel Life
Her smile, I'm sure, burnt Rome to the ground.
— Mark Z. Danielewski
You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.
— Al Capone
Valkyrie Cain got out of the passenger side. She zipped upher black jacket against the cold, and joined Skulduggery as hewalked up to the front door. She glanced at him, and saw that he was smiling."Stop doing that,” she sighed.“Stop doing what?” Skulduggery responded in that gloriously velvet voice of his.“Stop smiling. The person we want to talk to lives in the only dark house on a bright street. That’s not a good sign.”“I didn’t realise I was smiling,” he said. They stopped at the door, and Skulduggery made a concerted effort to shift his features. His mouth twitcheddownwards. “Am I smiling now?”“No.”“Excellent,” he said, and the smile immediately sprang back up.
— Derek Landy, Mortal Coil
She smiled, and there it was again, that aching pressure in his chest. Love, or a heart attack. Kind of the same thing.
— Kristan Higgins, Somebody to Love
People with dimple have a divine role in this universe: smile!
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
... have a smile for everyone you meet and a plan to kill them.
— Brad Thor, The Apostle
She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time
— Ann Brashares, My Name Is Memory
I sit up, edge over close to my window, and push it open, slipping one leg in, then the next, turning back to Jase. “Come on.” His smile flashes in the gathering dark as his eyebrows lift, but he climbs carefully in as I lock my bedroom door.“Be still,” I tell him. “Now I’m going to learn all about you.
— Huntley Fitzpatrick, My Life Next Door
You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.
— Lucy Christopher
I like your glasses,” he said. “I like your Simon Snow T-shirts. I like that you don’t smile at everyone, because then, when you smile at me... Cather.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl