c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.
— John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire
violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.
— Louis L'Amour, The Daybreakers
We must overturn so many idols, the idol of self first of all, so that we can be humble, and only from our humility can learn to be redeemers, can learn to work together in the way the world really needs. Liberation that raises a cry against others is no true liberation. Liberation that means revolutions of hate and violence and takes away lives of others or abases the dignity of others cannot be true liberty. True liberty does violence to self and, like Christ, who disregarded that he was sovereign becomes a slave to serve others.
— Oscar A. Romero, The Violence of Love
One tended to lose one’s bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")
— Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
Maxim 10: Sometimes the only way out is through... through the hull.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
— Howard Tayler
What do you think? Overkill?""I don't believe there is any such thing.But in this case, 'yes, overkill.
— Howard Tayler, The Teraport Wars
Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.
— Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love
Revolution does have to be violent precisely because the Pharaoh won't let you go. If the Pharaoh would let you go, the revolution won't have to be violent.
— Michael Hardt
The boldest of the three (thieves) moved suddenly, grabbed Angua and pulled her upright. "We walk out of here unharmed or the girl gets it, all right?" he snarled. Someone sniggered. "I hope you're not going to kill anyone," said Carrot."That's up to us!""Sorry, was I talking to you?" said Carrot. "Don't worry, I'll be fine," said Angua. She looked around to make sure Cheery wasn't there and then sighed."Come on, gentlemen, let's get this over with.""Don't play with your food!" said a voice from the crowd.There were one or two giggles until Carrot turned in his seat, whereupon everyone was suddenly intensely interested in their drinks."It's OK," said Angua quietly.Aware that something was off kilter, but not quite sure what it was, the thieves edged back to the door. No one moved as they unbolted it and, still holding Angua, stepped out into the fog, shutting the door behind them. "Hadn't we better help," said a constable who was new to the Watch. "They don't deserve help," said Vimes. there was a clank of armor and then a long, deep growl, right outside in the street. And a scream and then another scream. and a third scream modulated with "NONONOnonononononoNO!...aarghaarghaargh!" Something heavy hit the door.
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.
— Barbara Deming, Prisons That Could Not Hold
It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks.
— James  Jones, From Here to Eternity
Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.
— Maximilien de Robespierre
No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone
Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.
— Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison
You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body.
— Greg X. Graves, Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes
In the preface of "The Rifles" "Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq"Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Welzi 1933. 
— William T. Vollmann, The Rifles
The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22
— Thomas Merton, Gandhi On Non-Violence
Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport 'did more harm than good,' which I remember thinking was (a) euphemistic and (b) a slipshod expression unworthy of a professor of English.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
I was trying to foment a little dissension.' He paused. 'No, that's too flippant. How about trying to make the system less warlike—injecting a little love?' He snorted. 'Through violence, of course, like all religious reformers.
— L.E. Modesitt Jr., The Parafaith War
Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity – its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.
— Tobias Wolff
In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.
— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Maxim 12: A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
— Howard Tayler
Maxim 27: Don't be afraid to be the first to resort to violence.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
— Howard Tayler
The germ of creation lies in violence.
— Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
The spirit of the law is the least of the things we're prepared to violate.
— Howard Tayler, The Tub of Happiness
If a violent person wishes to attack us, let us send him a gentle phrase as this will defuse his violence.
— Samael Aun Weor, The Initiatic Path In The Arcana Of Tarot And Kabbalah
Air traffic control is going to have a steamy old fit on your dime, boy.They can get in line behind the police, the people whose cars we trashed, the Empire of Ob'enn, the Partnership Collective, and the Wormgate Corporation. Oh, and I think maybe some dark matter beasties from Andromeda.You "think maybe"?-General Tagon & Captain Andreyasn
— Howard Tayler, Resident Mad Scientist
Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.
— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
When I find the guy who torched that forest, I'm going to eat him. And I'm only going to half-cook him first.-Sergeant Schlock
— Howard Tayler, The Teraport Wars
I hate and fear violence myself, have always avoided barroom brawls, and tho' I'm a bit of a gun-nut, and a member of the NRA, I never shoot at anything but beer cans and mule deer. (In season.) And seldom hit either, except by accident.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
To use violence against a peaceful man is the greatest immorality and the biggest rot ever!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Whatever your objective in life may be, never use violence to get it! Violence belongs to the Land of Evil; once you enter there, your face and your heart is forever sealed with the devilish ugliness of the violence!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism.
— Graham Greene, The Comedians
Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.
— Richard Price, I Wanderers
Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.
— Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex
You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you’ve hurt them, marked them, they’re even more sick and ugly, aren’t they? And they’re afraid and cringing too. Oh, I know this isn’t very pleasant, but you did ask.”“Go on” he said.“So you’ve got a frightened, stupid, even disabled person, silenced, made ugly, and what can you do with someone like that, someone who’s unworthy of being treated well? You treat them badly because that’s what they deserve. One thinks of poor little kids that no one love because they’re dirty, sovered in snot and shit, and always screaming. So you beat them because they’re hateful, they’re low, they’re sub-human. That’s all they’re good for, being hit, being reduced even further.
— Ruth Rendell, Simisola
Can violence and the use of force to effect change upon the universe be left to the young? Do they see what was, what is, and what might yet be? Have they suffered, watched evil fall upon the good, or good upon the evil?Or should the burden of violence be left to those who can bear it most lightly—upon those who have closed their minds or their feelings? How can they understand the suffering that they must inflict?Should the burden of force be laid upon the short-lived, who will not see the consequences of their actions? How can they dispense force with compassion if they can escape the knowledge of what they do?...The greater the force brought to bear, the older and wiser must be the entity who wields it. Wisdom allows sorrow. Age allows experience, and knowledge reinforces wisdom and experience....Those who would bear the burden of force must be those who are strong and do not seek it, for those who seek force would misuse it, and those who are weak would shy from what they must 
— L.E. Modesitt Jr., The Parafaith War
What deep violence does the mind invent / As polar opposite to love. (In 'Hat Love').
— Tony Williams, All The Rooms Of Uncle's Head
I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dumfermline lost at home(p. 83-84)
— John Burnside, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir
Let them have guns' is as much a solution to mass murder and gun violence as 'Let them have drugs' is a solution to drug addiction.
— DaShanne Stokes
Feet away, Professor Dema stood, carrying a large gunlike weapon with both her hands and a snarl on her lips. This was not the way final exams were supposed to go.
— Nnedi Okorafor, Home
Every time there was conquest, it brought trade, new ideas, and inventions. They made civilization evolve to new heights. Humans soar on the wings of our violent nature. There's no other way.
— Adam Burch, Song of Edmon
The line between straight men having sex with men and "actual" homosexuality is under constant scrutiny, and for straight men, violence is a key element that imbues homosexuality with heterosexual meaning, or untangles hetero-erotic forms of homosexuality from the affective, political, and romantic associations with gay and lesbian life. Sometimes this violence takes the form of humiliation or physical force enacted by one straight man as he makes sexual contact with another; in other cases, it may take the form of two men fantasizing about sexual violence against women. In many cases, violence is a central part of the work of reframing homosexual sex as an act that men do to build one another's strength, or to build what I call "anal resilience," thereby inoculating one another against what they imagine are the sincere expressions of gay selfhood.
— Jane  Ward, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men
In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
...a freeze response (dissociation, collapse, numbing, paralysis, deadness) during the incident that threatened your life or limb. Sometimes it's difficult for people to understand that this is really survival response...
— Babette Rothschild, 8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery: Take-Charge Strategies to Empower Your Healing
Commitment to nonviolence must not be based on patient acquiescence in intolerable conditions. Rather, it stems from a deeper knowledge of the self-defeating, self-corrupting effect of lapses into violence.
— David T. Dellinger
Violent love eats up what it does love, and it is mere appetite. I scribbled on the bottom of this before sending it back: I would sooner cut my own flesh than do you a hurt. You should not have tried to get between us! But only come to see me, and another time I will stand and let me beat to a mummy.
— Maria McCann, As Meat Loves Salt
Saying both sides participated in violence doesn't mean both sides are equally ideologically wrong, you know.
— T.J. Kirk
It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.
— Malcom X
Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Heads up lads!” someone shouted. “Here we go!”More missiles, this time not just bottles, but coins as well. And then from the other side of the cordon, a roar went up. Bellowing across the road toward them. Billy watched as the Manchester lads poured forward, desperately trying to force a way through the massed ranks of the police only to be driven back by batons and gloved fists. Another salvo of bottles came flying across, trying to provoke a reaction. But the West Ham lads merely stood and laughed. They didn’t need to respond. The point had been made, the result earned. Billy was happy. Very happy.
— Dougie Brimson, Top Dog
Okay then, we’re set” he thought. “Come and get it”. The enemy, his enemy, were walking into the classic football ambush and they didn’t have a fucking clue.
— Dougie Brimson, The Crew
Don't you ever think,' he asked cautiously, 'that it would be better to be a bully than to be bullied? At least that way no one could ever hurt you.' Katarina turned to him in amazement. 'No,' she said definitively, shaking her head. 'No Pieter, I never think that, not for a moment.
— John Boyne, The Boy at the Top of the Mountain
A HUG IS LIKE VIOLENCE MADE OF LOVE.
— Chuck Wendig, Star Wars - Aftermath - Empire's End
Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. Eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for the future.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
We don’t necessarily know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that violence is as simple as it is complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt in so many terrible, intimate ways.
— Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
When we allow violence against some, we enable violence against all.
— DaShanne Stokes
Order is a slippery thing: it's in the eyes of the beholder and the judgments of the powerful. Safety is clearer: it's freedom from violence and intrusion.
— Chris Hayes, Colony In A Nation
What you love too violently finishes by killing you.
— Guy de Maupassant
Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying. But remove the satisfaction, and the act becomes hollow.
— Alan Turning
The first drops of rain started to fall.'God's policemen,' said Jester. 'You what?' 'The police always used to pray for rain before any big demonstration because people wouldn't turn up. Nobody wants to run riot in the streets if it's pouring with rain. Who's going to want to fight in this?
— Charlie Higson, The Enemy
I was covered in gore, dripping in slime, and in a very bad mood.
— Lavie Tidhar, The Old Dispensation
I threatened to gouge one of his eyes out." Cathy
— Dennis Kelly, DNA
He thought how easy it would be to write an entire book on Johannesburg violence. The strike leader Pickaxe Mary, after whom Mary Fitzgerald Square was named, who attacked her enemies with a pickaxe handle. The trenches dug into the streets of Fordsburg during the 1922 miners’ strike. The cannons of the government aimed at the poor whites of Vrededorp. The murdered woman in the 1960s whose head was found in the Zoo Lake and whose torso was discovered in a suitcase in Wemmer Pan. Jan Smuts, who wanted to bomb striking workers with aeroplanes. The countless schoolchildren shot during the 1976 uprising. The fifty-three supporters who were shot down in the street outside Shell House, the ANC headquarters. The huge bomb that went off shortly before the first democratic election and made a whole row of shops kneel down on the pavements of Bree Street. The commuters, in the early 1990s, killed by pangas or who jumped to their deaths from moving trains to escape their Portuguese-speaking attackers. The murderess Daisy de Melker, whose third husband survived only because she was caught in time. The violent home invasions, rapes and hijackings he read about in the newspapers every day.
— Harry Kalmer, 'n Duisend stories oor Johannesburg: 'n stadsroman
No one understands me but I am cool with that. I was different from others. I knew this from when I was young. Things that turned people off normally about violence and death did the exact opposite with me. For when I was a small boy, death always intrigued me. I loved watching things die. Watching life leave someone's eyes was an adrenaline rush.
— Jewel_louise, His Baby
we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
The 21st century has certainly seen the rape of women in wartime, but it has long been treated as an atrocious war crime, which most armies try to prevent and the rest deny and conceal. But for the heroes of the Iliad, female flesh was a legitimate spoil of war: women were to be enjoyed, monopolized, and disposed of at their pleasure. Menelaus launches the Trojan War when his wife, Helen, is abducted. Agamemnon brings disaster to the Greeks by refusing to return a sex slave to her father, and when he relents, he appropriates one belonging to Achilles, later compensating him with twenty-eight replacements. Achilles, for his part, offers this pithy description of his career: “I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women.”11 When Odysseus returns to his wife after twenty years away, he murders the men who courted her while everyone thought he was dead, and when he discovers that the men had consorted with the concubines of his household, he has his son execute the concubines too.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
God, who is omnipotent, could have softened Pharaoh’s heart, but he hardens it instead, which gives him a reason to afflict every Egyptian with painful boils and other miseries before killing every one of their firstborn sons. (The word Passover alludes to the executioner angel’s passing over the households with Israelite firstborns.) God follows this massacre with another one when he drowns the Egyptian army as they pursue the Israelites across the Red Sea. The Israelites assemble at Mount Sinai and hear the Ten Commandments, the great moral code that outlaws engraved images and the coveting of livestock but gives a pass to slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide of neighboring tribes. The Israelites become impatient while waiting for Moses to return with an expanded set of laws, which will prescribe the death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath. To pass the time, they worship a statue of a calf, for which the punishment turns out to be, you guessed it, death. Following orders from God, Moses and his brother Aaron kill three thousand of their companions.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes the Psalms. After he makes his name by killing Goliath, David recruits a gang of guerrillas, extorts wealth from his fellow citizens at swordpoint, and fights as a mercenary for the Philistines. These achievements make Saul jealous: the women in his court are singing, “Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands.” So Saul plots to have him assassinated.19 David narrowly escapes before staging a successful coup. When David becomes king, he keeps up his hard-earned reputation for killing by the tens of thousands. After his general Joab “wasted the country of the children of Ammon,” David “brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes.” 20 Finally he manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census. To punish David for this lapse, God kills seventy thousand of his citizens.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we are apt to forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago, and to be blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
What are the final lessons learned? I came to the conclusion that the most powerful human motive by far is the striving for attachment to loved ones in perpetuity. Humans will do anything for this, including blowing themselves (and others) to pieces. I learned that tribalism is universal. It may start with the attachment to another (typically, the mother and disinterest in those who are not her), and it may be furthered by the division of in-group as those we recognize and out-group as the rest, but our capacity for symbolism established in- and outgroups in us all, and we view their actions completely differently. We need, if we are to survive, a sense both of humanity as a tribe and of humanity’s potential for radical violence. If we delude ourselves that we are the civilized entity we appear to be on the surface, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, only with more powerful and devastating weapons.
— Donald G. Dutton, The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why "Normal" People Come to Commit Atrocities
The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
After all, what Buddhism offers as a solution is universalised indifference - a learning of how to withdraw from too much empathy. This is why Buddhism can so easily turn into the very opposite of universal compassion: the advocacy of a ruthless military attitude, which is what the fate of Zen Buddhism aptly demonstrates.
— Slavoj Žižek
Worst of all, with every victim, who is deliberately silenced to preserve the peace, we are creating a new minority. Through deliberate neglect, the left creates what they fear the most: a non-ethnic group of people that will not blink an eye, when violent crimes are committed. No one cared when it happened to them, so why should they? An eye for an eye...as they don't use them anyway.
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Violence is formed by the scarcity of nature, and will stay with us as long as we live in scarcity.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
A weapon is only an extension of one’s own persona
—  as lethal or useless as the person wielding it.
Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
— Derrick Jensen
All beings tremble before violence.All fear death.All love life.See yourself in others.Then whom can you hurt?What harm can you do?
— Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada
In myth, violent death is always justified.
— René Girard
Some carry beautifully crafted swords all their lives, and never realise, until they are daubed in blood, that the pleasure comes not from owning a sword, no matter how perfect, but from letting it cut.
— John  French, Ahriman: The Omnibus
At that moment Sonny noticed that the other car had not kept going but had parked a few feet ahead, still blocking his way. At that same moment his lateral vision caught sight of another man in the darkened tollbooth to his right. But he did not have time to think about that because two men came out of the car parked in front and walked toward him. The toll collector still had not appeared. And then in the fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone he knew he was a dead man. And in that moment his mind was lucid, drained of all violence, as if the hidden fear finally real and present had purified him.
— Mario Puzo, The Godfather
At that moment Sonny noticed that the other car had not kept going but had parked a few feet ahead, still blocking his way. At that same moment his lateral vision caught sight of another man in the darkened tollbooth to his right. But he did not have time to think about that because two men came out of the car parked in front and walked toward him. The toll collector still had not appeared. And then in the fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man. And in that moment his mind was lucid, drained of all violence, as if the hidden fear finally real and present had purified him.
— Mario Puzo
When I was achild my worldwasn’t blackand white,it was grey,until I gotbeat upenough timesto realizemy skin wasbeige, anddifferent
— Phil Volatile, Crushed Black Velvet
When you hurt some cunt […] it’s you duty to enjoy it, otherwise you’ve done it for fuck all, it means nothing
— Irvine Welsh, The Blade Artist
Lia caught sight of it immediately and glared at him. "You gave me your word. You swore you wouldn't tell him.""I'm a mass murderer," he said pointedly. "Not exactly trustworthy.
— M. Kane, Queen of Thieves
Sertorius rose up and spoke to his army, “You see, fellow soldiers, that perseverance is more prevailing than violence, and that many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little. Assiduity and persistence are irresistible, and in time overthrow and destroy the greatest powers whatever. Time being the favorable friend and assistant of those who use their judgment to await his occasions, and the destructive enemy of those who are unseasonably urging and pressing forward.
— Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, Vol 2
And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
If ten men are trying to lynch one allegedly vile person, than we can be completely sure that there are ten vile people and one allegedly vile person over there! Don’t forget, violence makes you a low man!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Sadistic brutality and mystical feeling go always hand in hand when the normal capacity for orgastic experience is lacking. This was as true of the inquisitors of the medieval church, of the cruel and mystical Philip II of Spain, as it is of any modern mass murderer.
— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Go ahead, kill me! But live with this: All those people die!For the rest of your life, somewhere behind the feeds, that human part of you hiding down deep will always wonder how much pain you could have prevented if you hadn't been so weak!
— Rick Remender, Tokyo Ghost, Vol. 2: Come Join Us
Each subject perceives and instigates the violence within the philosophy of nonviolence since injustice, hatred and such conduct hold the feeling of violence, even changing the system, first, passes the violence before it prevails. Despite that, violence also exists, in one's thoughts, without exception; however, the question is not the violence, but self-control that demonstrates the peace, which approaches the victory and supremacy.
— Ehsan Sehgal
Of course a carp is just a carp, waiting to become either your pet, or a gefilte fish. But am I wrong to also see this body lying in a pool of blood, being fibbed about in plain sight, as a metaphor for all the corpses and blood never discussed?
— Leela Corman, We All Wish For Deadly Force
...Bad behavior is bipartisan, but the Left seems to have an instinct for violence. This makes perfect sense for a worldview with revolutionary underpinnings....But yet, they claim oppression due to their inability to control the words and minds of others. That is why the Left is a threat to both freedom and democracy: Because at the end of the day, they don't really believe in either.
— Jonathon von Maren
On matters where it is difficult or impossible to pin the blame for their policies' failures on conservatives, the fallback position has been to hurl a slur at anyone pointing out the obvious failure....The left's never-ending use of these worn-out attacks on the character and motivations of those who disagree with them has caused them to lose their effect....At the ground level, since liberals have lost the ability to win any and every political discussion by hurling a slur, they are simply resorting to the next level in political interaction: violence and physical intimidation.
— Sean Harshey
Where ever there's guilt there's violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood.
— Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer
Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator.
— J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
The problem with depicting abusers as full-time monsters is that when a person is actually experiencing abuse in their own life, they'll think "oh but he's the sweetest guy most of the time so he can't be an abuser " or "but he's not ALWAYS horrible, he's usually amazing, so he's not an abuser", and they'll make the mistake of thinking they mustn't really be being abused when they actually are.
— Miya Yamanouchi
Pacifists have usually regarded the use of violence as absolutely wrong, irrespective of its consequences. This, like other ‘no matter what’ prohibitions, assumes the validity of the distinction between acts and omissions. Without this distinction, pacifists who refuse to use violence when it is the only means of preventing greater violence would be responsible for the greater violence they fail to prevent.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
Hand holding sword is always an ugly hand!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
It didn't take much prompting for Cariocas who were sick of living with violence to advocate violence as a solution.
— Juliana Barbassa, Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink
A society that decides its controversial issues by ballots does better than one that uses bullets – which, after all, is no more likely to lead to the right conclusion than voting.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
Collective violence has flowed regularly out of the central political processes of western countries... The oppressed have struck in the name of justice, the privileged in the name of order, the in-between in the name of fear.
— Charles Tilly
But people had forgotten there was a day in the not too distant past when they’d not seen or heard of bombings, and suicide vests, and snipers. Alicia, though, had not forgotten.
— Rona Simmons, The Martyr's Brother
The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not the children of forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence.An Okeke woman will never kill a child kindled inside of her. She would go against even her husband to keep a child in her womb alive. However, custom dictates that the child is the child of her father. These Nuru had planted poison. An Okeke woman who gave birth to an Ewu child was bound to the Nuru through her child.
— Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death
With the million or more words contained in the English language, one notorious word has been able to stand out and hold its title as the most physically demanding. Violence; a word commonly bestowed upon embellished acts of crude conflict, and physical contact. The word has never brought good feelings, or good thoughts, but rather emotions of unpleasant behavior due to the severity of its nature. Over the years, violence has evolved from a basic skirmish, to an array of things. Violence in modern day time is now being used to install fear, and to persuade innocent individuals into doing whatever the perpetrator desires, such as: personal gain, rape, and advancement of power. Every day another innocent person is being robbed, and demeaned by violent characters lurking the dark streets. Not only has violence been an ongoing epidemic, but it’s only getting worse as the years go on. We see horrendously violent acts being committed every day.
— Slavoj Žižek
Please stay safe inside, and should you see yourself, I cannot condone murdering yourself. I just do not believe violence is ever the answer. (It is a question. The real answer is far more terrifying.)
— Jeffrey Cranor
Treachery and violence are a just return for treachery and violence.
— Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
American culture has regressed because of contemporary society’s glorification of making a good living and spending free time in media activities rather than constantly devoting themselves to a learning and self-improvement. The combination of grooming youngsters to fit into a commercial workplace and Americans willingness to submit themselves to endless hours of watching television shows filled with murders, violence, sex, and replete with advertisements that promote the goods of commercial giants has eroded the American spirit and contributed to lack of an intellectually sophisticated populous.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We have seen lots of people who are living in our world together with us but their religion taught them which they are better than us, so i would like to give those people a small advice that if your religion or your faith requires to hate people of other religions and faiths, and your religious leaders from one way or other way spreading hate and violence among people then is better that u stop believing in that religion cause i am pretty sure that religion does not apporoved by God but by mankind. God said that love every human beings beyond any condition and he also mentioned even your enemies so if a religion taught their followers not to love other religion followers or they are better then others then mean it is against God word. i would like to say that we should not condemn other for choosing a life path which they want even if it is something which we hate it or our religion does not approve it. We don't have to condemn but to understand thoes who are not believing what we believe. i also believe there is no religion which is more important and better then humanity so let's never judge people cause of their believe , nationality, colour or country. let's more important stay human, love humanity and love human beings unconditionally.
— Arash Tabish
As always, violence created more violence [Jehane Noujaim, "Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square"].
— Catie Marron, City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
Domestic violence rarely affects only those directly involved in the abusive relationship.
— Asa Don Brown
The waves thundered still onto the beach the next morning and Davy spent a good hour watching them pound the sand. It was therapeutic. He didn't know which he identified with more - the surf, raging against immovable stone outcroppings, or the rocks, taking enormous punishment without being able to strike back
— Stephen Charles Gould
While opposing injustice nonviolently, he (Gandhi) insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it at all.
— David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?
— Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island
Violence is rather a strange phenomenon that can be compared to fire, once out of control it’s loyal to no one, not even to the person who started it.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
The truth is, it is the younger inexperience gangsters who often cut down the older original gangsters. The best way for this young thug to prove himself to others, is to simply cut down an established gangster. Thus, this cruel cycle of senseless violence repeats itself, with the younger being more vicious and rootless than his predecessor. It’s the dog, who kills the lion, and once he has killed the lion, he’s no longer a dog; he’s now a lion himself.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
One who has a deaden conscience can never live within the confinements of the law.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
No, my career as a warrior princess, short as it had been, was over, I thought morosely. Violence only works if you're good at it. Otherwise, it hurts too much.
— Sherwood Smith, The Trouble with Kings
Anybody can act violently--there is nothing to it, but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words.
— Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller
No party has renounced the right to armed resistance, in certain circumstances without lying
— Friedrich Engels
The English word 'creativity' is derived from the Roman-Latin creo - to create. It is inextricably linked to the Western notion of a creator - a divine intervention and violent disrupter.
— Thorsten J. Pattberg
It dropped ice to the bottom of his stomach. He thought of the ruined bodies he'd seen, including the ones he himself had ruined. He realized that he had somehow expected that he'd never have to think again about the way people damage other people. The night of the invasion. Kestrel's back. His own. Roshar's scarred face. His own.
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Kiss
Life is sacred"? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death! Has been for thousands of years! Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians; all taking turns killing each other because God told 'em it was a good idea.
— George Carlin
Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
As part of the healing process, change your perception of yourself from “victim” to that of “advocate” and “survivor.
— Don Easton, Angel in the Full Moon
In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.
— J.G. Ballard
Thunder without sound jolted the air around her. The violence of it was magnificent, immaculate, glorious.
— Terry Goodkind, The First Confessor
Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.
— William Faulkner
If a cavalcade of organized killing has nothing to teach us, I don’t know what does.
— James K. Morrow, The Eternal Footman
I sense that you are nearby, son and daughter of the Almari bloodline. I will soon come for you both.
— Eric Mrozek, Destruction
Serge nodded. 'And I respect your opinion because you smoke marijuana. You're chemically biased against violence and job applications.
— Tim Dorsey, Pineapple Grenade
New York City is a tinderbox. The Sons of the Serpent - a white supremacist group with a twisted history, deep pockets, and long reach - declared it a combat zone. As they have many times before, they're unashamedly ginning bigotry and hatred into violence and bloodshed. But this time, they've gotten smart about it. Instead of parading through the streets in hoods and robes... they've gone undercover. Dozens upon dozens of them, hiding inside the New York justice system so they can control the law. Control the people. And as God is my witness, I will drive them out and strike them down... no matter what the cost.
— Mark Waid, Daredevil, Volume 7
[Speaking to 29-year-old ex-guerrilla]'I see it as a process. First, yes, you do negotiate. But if that does not work, then you have to use violence to get what you need. Even if you have to bomb a school.' There was a swagger to that statement, a perverted machismo: only a real man understands the necessity of bombing a school.
— Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War
If you carry a sword, you obey the sword, not the other way round. Nobody can hold a weapon and keep their hands clear of blood at the same time.
— Elif Shafak, The Architect's Apprentice
All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.
— Alice  Miller
Being loud after drinking wine doesn't help. Being silent after drinking wine doesn't help. Nothing really ever gets solved either way.
— Mariel Hemingway, Invisible Girl
Young Bride had a scratch on her neck from the knife, but no other external injuries. It seemed she was killed by the shock the drunks gave her.After sixty-odd years, reliving the trauma of that fateful night was too much to bear.There was no funeral procession. She was buried on the unlucky hill on the outskirts of the village.The crickets, however, remained around her shack and continued to sing until the first snow fell.
— Susumu Katsumata, Red Snow
This was what Ditlev loved: ceaseless gunfire, ceaseless killing, flapping specks in the sky terminated in an orgy of color. The slow drizzle of birds' bodies falling from above. The eagerness of the men to reload their weapons.
— Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Absent One
If the world is unjust, get drunk, wave a sword, then cut off heads.
— A Que, Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 104
Two years before, when the riots started, the media had had a field day, but now people discussed them less and less. ... ...in fact the media's attitude had changed over the last few months. No one talked about violence in the banlieues or race riots anymore. That was all passed over in silence.
— Michel Houellebecq, Soumission
If I interrupted violence, by all means I'll step back. Always nice to see bloodshed first thing in the a.m.
— Maya Banks, The Darkest Hour
This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.
— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Someone once asked me if I knew the feeling of fear. Oh, I knew fear. Well, really speaking I never feared any fucker at that time; I’ve got to be honest. But I knew fear, the fear of losing! There was never any fear of combat! My father instilled that fear in to me and that was what drove me on to win … the fear of what was to come after you went home saying you’d lost!
— Stephen Richards, Street Warrior: The True Story of the Legendary Malcolm Price, Britain's Hardest Man