Quotes on Violence

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reigns supreme.

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?

It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violences for the reason that when their control does snap, it goes entirely. (Hercule Poirot)

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.

As for my own part I care not for death, for all men are mortal; and though I be a woman yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am indeed endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.

They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak they create the seeds of turmoil and violence.

there is enough treachery , hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day

I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.

...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.

It is not violence that best overcomes hate -- nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.

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

This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.