“..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.”
“But strength doesn’t always mean brute force. You don’t have to kick ass to be a fighter. Violence doesn’t equal strength. Lead your army by example. There’s a better answer to all this. War isn’t going to solve anything, but it will tear our two worlds apart, and there will be casualties, including humans. There’s nothing heroic about this war. It will lead to a destruction unlike anything you or I have ever seen”
“What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.”
“Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use violence to get what they want.”
“There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
“People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, but they do not know how to, because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. . . . We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in our whole culture -- in the theater of cruelty, in the violence in the streets, in the death of man in art and life.”
“If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ... , the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.”
“If anyone hits me, they can expect to be hit back, and harder. I never turn the other cheek because in my experience that doesn’t work.”
“Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.”
“I’ve seen daggers pierce the chest, Children dying in the road, Crawling things hooked and baited, Rapists bound and then castrated, Villains singed in public square. Yet none these sights did make me cringe Like when my Love cut all her hair.”
“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.”