“Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than terror and terrorism. These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked ( retaliation, protective reaction, etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U.S. power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence-wholesale as opposed to retail terror-during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not terror, [...] security forces only retaliate and engage in police action. These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as reactive and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of terrorism. [...] Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Comme une envie de lui faire du mal… beaucoup de mal. Il n’a jamais ressenti ça vis-à-vis d’une fille. Il ne comprend pas, mais c’est plus fort que lui, des idées plus brutales les unes que les autres forcent son esprit, des scènes atroces se succèdent où les cris de la jeune fille excitent son imagination. Les battements de son cœur s’accélèrent, il tremble comme un junkie en manque.”
“Allah-U-Akbar (God is great) is the most frightening word, because it always reminds me that someone is committing crime;specifically murder.”
“I was not frightened as they were, for the very violence of his threats showed how weak he was.”
“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.”
“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.”
“GUNS ARE NOT THE ISSUE. WE ARE.”
“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.”
“You don t get it boy... this isn t a mudhole... its an operating table. (KRAKKKKK) And I m the surgeon.”
“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.”
“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.”
“..each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.”
“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.”
“We owe our children – the most vulnerable citizens in any society – a life free from violence and fear.”