Violence Quotes

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When people are laughing, they're generally not killing each other.

- Alan Alda

Violence is an admission that one's ideas and goals cannot prevail on their own merits.

- Edward Kennedy

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Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.

- Julia Ward Howe

You must show the world that you abhor fighting.

- Bishop Desmond Tutu

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

- Theodor Adorno

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

- Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

For every Crusade and Revolution and Civil War, there have always been those who argued, with great clarity, that violence not only was immoral but that it was even a less effective means of achieving laudable goals.

- Mark Kurlansky

Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing.

- Mark Kurlansky

Violence is not power, but the absence of power.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

- Albert Camus

Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other dictators were exposed to severe physical mistreatment in childhood and refused to face up to the fact later. Instead of seeing and feeling what had happened to them, they avenged themselves vicariously by killing millions of people. And millions of others helped them to do so.

- Alice Miller

The claim that mild punishments (slaps or smacks) have no detrimental effect is still widespread because we got this message very early from our parents who had taken it over from their own parents. Unfortunately, the main damage it causes is precisely the broad dissemination of this conviction. The result of which is that each successive generation is subjected to the tragic effects of so called physical "correction."

- Alice Miller

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

- Alice Miller

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary, the evil it does is permanent.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

- Jimmy Carter

If we are going to stop wars on this earth, we are going to have to make war on hunger our number one priority.

- David W. Brooks

I am not predicting the dawn of global democracy or global socialism. What I am predicting is an era of turmoil and uncertainty. Moreover, like all forms of power, interdependent power has a dark side, and it has always had a dark side. The hungry and diseased mobs who terrified the burghers of late-medieval Europe were not enlightenment thinkers, nor are the suicide bombers thrust forward by a resurgent Islam. Even the struggles of the Western Federation of Miners had a dark side, as they fought state and company violence with their own violence. Still, the defiant movements from the bottom that are fueled by interdependent power hold at least the hope that the needs and dreams of the great masses of the planet's people will make their imprint on the new societies for which we wish. Of course, the process of reform will be complicated and the outcomes shaped not only by interdependent power, but also by the complex institutional structures we inherit, cultural memory, and the concentrated power resources of aggrandizing elites. All that said, without the tempering influence of movements from below and the interdependent power they wield, our future is ominous.

- Frances Fox Piven