Meaningless Violence Quotes & Sayings

What is gentlest in love is love's violence.
Losing yourself in love, you reach love's goal.
Love makes you suffer, as love makes you whole.
Love steals your everything and makes you rich.
Love is both meaningless and poetry.
Captured by love, by love you are set free. — Marilyn Nelson

The notion that we've made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat of such violent force behind it, all law would be meaningless. I prefer stories that remind us of that. At its core, history is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun. — James Carlos Blake

Society had grown cruel. People who felt they were unwanted or unwelcome in their own country, reacted with aggression. There was no such thing as meaningless violence. Every violent act had a meaning for the person who committed it. Only when you dared accept this truth could you hope to turn society in another direction. — Henning Mankell

What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn't deny it and doesn't try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself. — Thomas Frank

The accent of one's birthplace persists in the mind and heart as much as in speech. — La Rouchefoucauld

Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "doing something"; academics participate in meaningless "debates," etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even "critical" participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a "dialogue" ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The "Bartlebian act" I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical thing is to do nothing). — Slavoj Zizek

Bolshevism in its proper perspective, namely, as the most recent development in the age-long struggle waged by the Jewish Nation against ... Christ ... — Denis Fahey

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand! — Herman Melville

Nonviolence becomes meaningless if violence is permitted for self-defence. — Mahatma Gandhi

I know you're scared, but doing something even though it scares you is the definition of brave. — Sarah Morgan

He saw an idiot in a yard in a leather harness chained to a clothesline and it leaned and swayed drooling and looked out upon the alley with eyes that fed the most rudimentary brain and yet seemed possessed of news in the universe denied right forms, like perhaps the eyes of squid whose simian depths seem to harbor some horrible intelligence. All down past the hedges a gibbering and howling in a hoarse frog's voice, word perhaps of things known raw, unshaped by the constructions of a mind obsessed with form. — Cormac McCarthy

Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame; Ev'y thin' thet' s done inhuman Injers all on 'em the same. — James Russell Lowell

Anecdotal tales of combat are meaningless to Americans, we absorb tales of violence like a sponge. Mythological violence is second nature to us. The real thing is not. War begins long before battle. It begins when we are boys longing for the initiation rite of the warrior and everything it promises: sexual prowess and sexual license. War lasts long after the last bullet is fired; into old age and death we go carrying a secret knowledge that no one wants to know about. War is the opposite of sexual prowess. War is desire stripped of humanity. — Alfredo Vea

If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes
I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century. — Francois Rabelais

You can't just walk away when somebody recognizes you. You have to take some time out and talk to them. It's not a waste of time - I just love talking to people. And I don't do this to sell records. The truth is, I do what I do because I love it. — Kenny G

A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence. — J.G. Ballard

There should be as much difference between the worldling and the Christian, as between hell and heaven, between destruction and eternal life. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I hate what's become of the world. Most of the humans do. There's so much violence and blood and meaningless death. It's not even the normal kind of death where your heart stops beating and your loved ones put you in a hole in the ground. A boring way to spend eternity, but if you are lucky, that's what you'll get. — Tahnee Fritz

The progress of the world means more enjoyment and more misery too. — Swami Vivekananda

Never point at anything beige and call it cool. — Lea DeLaria

Earth's dispossessed are vulnerable targets for extremists: those who teach that global justice is meaningless; that satisfaction can come only in violence, division, and intellectual isolation. — Abdallah II Of Jordan

The world has always needed human beings who refuse to believe that history is nothing but a dull, monstrous selfrepetition, a selfperpetuating, meaningless game, only varied in outer garb, who cannot be converted from their conviction that history signifies progress in morality, that our race is ascending on an invisible ladder from an animal nature towards divinity, from brutal violence to the wisely ordering intellect, and that the ultimate stage of complete understanding is already close at hand, indeed has almost been attained. — Stefan Zweig

Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescapable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is our fellow creatures' lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man. And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth's happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man's attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational, or wicked. — Matthew Scully

But if you don't enjoy doing something, you'll be miserable no matter how much money you make. — Bob Schieffer

I understand why Laura did what she did. I think I'm supposed to be mad at her, but I'm not. I admire her courage. She saw what the world had to offer and said, No thank you. She saw the lies and hypocrisy and violence and hate and meaningless of it all and she chose another path. She won't live to see her grandchildren, but also won't live to see them suffer. — Rachel Cohn

What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet?
It would be appropriate.
When in Rome; burn it. — Iain M. Banks

One day, I stopped hating. I ceased all meaningless activity. I completed the circle. I Set my sights straight. Like an Arrow I flew. I stopped acting. I got tired of playing with you. Random violence and destruction Because my reason for living, my out, My excuse. What is your excuse? Destruction. Without hate, without fear, Without judgement. I am no better Than you. No-one knows this better Than I do. I just got tired of playing Parlor Games. — Henry Rollins

Sometimes people say to me they're against all forms of violence. A few weeks ago, I got a call from a pacifist activist who said, "Violence never accomplishes anything, and besides, it's really stupid." I asked, "What types of violence are you against?" "All types." "How do you eat? And do you defecate? From the perspective of carrots and intestinal flora, respectively, those actions are very violent." "Don't be absurd," he said. "You know what I mean." Actually I didn't. The definitions of violence we normally use are impossibly squishy, especially for such an emotionally laden, morally charged, existentially vital, and politically important word. This squishiness makes our discourse surrounding violence even more meaningless than it would otherwise be, which is saying a lot. — Derrick Jensen

Science proclaims that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are a meaningless speck in the grand scheme. A cosmic accident." He paused. "Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone. We are bombarded with violence, division, fracture, and betrayal. Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history? Does science hold anything sacred? Science looks for answers by probing our unborn fetuses. Science even presumes to rearrange our own DNA. It shatters God's world into smaller and smaller pieces in quest of meaning ... and all it finds is more questions. — Anonymous

Like most human behavior, violence has meaning: it only seems 'senseless' or 'meaningless' to the extent we are unable-or unwilling-to decode it. — Stephen A. Diamond

Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy. — Sydney J. Harris