Violence Quotes

All violence demands reform, and all violence desperately begs to be healed.

Bryant McGill

Any act of violence creates resentment and resistance, because humans were meant to be free.

Bryant McGill

Wanting anything too desperately is a form of aggression and violence, which will always be met with resistance.

Bryant McGill

The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.

Joan Chandos Bez

Declaration of a state(Kurdistan) is the legitimate right of the Kurdish nation. This goal should be realized, but without resorting to violence.

Massoud Barzani

Certainly, the contradiction of tensions and divisions between the followers of different religious traditions, sadly, cannot be denied. However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?

Pope Benedict XVI

We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and detterence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to "win the hearts and minds of the people" by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the "truth" of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.

Wendell Berry

Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

Alan Bennett

We are disposed, somewhat by culture and somewhat by nature, to solve our problems by violence, and even to enjoy doing so. And yet by now all of us must at least have suspected that our right to live, to be free, and to be at peace is not guaranteed by any act of violence. It can be guaranteed only by our willingness that all other persons should live, be free, and be at peace and by our willingness to use or give our own lives to make that possible.

Wendell Berry

Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in justice or in affirmation of rights or in defense of peace do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.

Wendell Berry

Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great and successful advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices.

Wendell Berry

To imply by the word "terrorism" that this sort of terror is the work exclusively of "terrorists" is misleading. The "legitimate" warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents. The distinction between the intention to perpetrate violence against innocents, as in "terrorism," and the willingness to do so, as in "war," is not a source of comfort.

Wendell Berry

If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaughts od cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces, following the general laws of violence of the picture These force-lines must encircle and involve the spectator so that he will an a manner be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture.

Umberto Boccioni

There is no such thing as an absolute despotism; it is only relative. A man cannot wholly free himself from obligation to his fellows. A sultan who cut off heads from caprice, would quickly lose his own in the same way. Excesses tend to check themselves by reason of their own violence. What the ocean gains in one place it loses in another.

Napoleon Bonaparte