Politics Violence Quotes & Sayings

As had been the case in the founding of Citizens Alert in 1965, the point that most linked gay politics to the struggles of other marginalized communities was that of state violence - in particular, police brutality. — Christina B. Hanhardt

Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold
that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give
up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will
never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be de-
struction. — Rebecca Solnit

The "small goodness" from one person to his fellowman is lost and deformed as soon as it seeks organization and universality and system, as soon as it opts for doctrine, a treatise of politics and theology, a party, a state, and even a church. Yet it remains the sole refuge of the good in being. Unbeaten, it undergoes the violence of evil, which, as small goodness, it can neither vanquish nor drive out. A little kindness going only from man to man, not crossing distances to get to the places where events and forces unfold! A remarkable utopia of the good or the secret of its beyond. — Emmanuel Levinas

Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual. — Auberon Herbert

Every day in America is a day with a shooting. — Bill Maher

I write that crime is an unlawful act of violence that can be committed by anyone, and that punishment is the consequence designed for criminals who don't have the economic means to cover it up. Throughout history, men of wealth and power have been exempt from facing the consequences of their evil deeds. Crime, therefore, can be defined as an offense committed by an individual of inferior status in society. Punishment is a consequence forced on the perpetrator of the crime only if he occupies one of the lower steps of the social ladder — Mahbod Seraji

Modern society, the political body, the legal and judiciary system, the state of governance, capitalism and the very fabric of the society itself, including our religions and so-called morals and values, are institutions steeped in traditions of absolute and total violence. — Bryant McGill

Do you mean that the tyrant will dare to use violence against the people who fathered him, and raise his hand against them if they oppose him? So the tyrant is a parricide, and little comfort to his old parent. — Plato

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. — Henry A. Wallace

Violence as a way of gaining power ... is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security ... — Alfred Adler

After September 11, some critics even tried to lump the antiglobalization protesters in with the terrorists, casting them as irresponsible destabilizers of the world order. But the protesters are the children of McWorld, and their objections are not Jihadic but merely democratic. Their grievances concern not world order but world disorder, and if the young demonstrators are a little foolish in their politics, a little naive in their analysis, and a little short on viable solutions, they understand with a sophistication their leaderes apparently lack that globalization's current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism, and violence. — Benjamin R. Barber

One of the lowest creatures on earth is the politician who tries to eliminate his political rivals using unlawful methods and even violence! To halt the march of such demonic people, never use the same immoral methods, because to defeat a poisonous snake you don't have to be a poisonous snake yourself! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

There is a very simple relationship between increased socioeconomic rifts in the society and increased violence, criminality, war, increased lack of trust between people, health problems and social exclusion - but it seems to be very difficult for people to understand this simple relationship. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Lucy's polls were sometimes kind of violent. — Charles M. Schulz

One [dogma] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators. — Steven Pinker

Only victors have stories to tell,
we the vanquished were then thought of
as cowards and weaklings whose memories
and fears should not be remembered. — Guy Sajer

The reactionary of any kind condemns sexual pleasure because it stimulates and repulses him at the same time. He is unable to solve the conflict within him between sexual demands and moralistic inhibitions. The revolutionary refutes the perverse, unhealthy kind of pleasure, because it is not his kind of pleasure, because it is not the sexuality of the future, but the sexuality which results from the conflict between instinct and morals, the sexuality of authoritarian society, a debased, smutty, pathological sexuality. — Wilhelm Reich

As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill. — Thomas Sowell

Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

The only real recourse that [Russian] people had against tsarist rule was violence and rebellion. It was once remarked that Russia's constitution was absolutism moderated by assassination. — Alan Beattie

So if black power means black armies racing through the streets, creating havoc, that certainly does nothing to advance the legitimate political and economic aspirations of the black community. Just the opposite, in fact....If they think a few Molotov cocktails are going to bring down the whole system and build something new, I'm afraid they're just indulging in wishful-thinking, — Truman Capote

The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. — Pope John Paul II

What you need to do in conflict resolution is to bring the people who believe that the answer to their political ambitions will be achieved through violence into a frame of mind that they accept that their political ambitions will be delivered by politics. — Des Browne

All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence. — C. Wright Mills

Generally speaking, by the way, that is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts. — Leon Trotsky

The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence. — Leon Trotsky

Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence ... politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good. — Bernard Crick

Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too. — Andrea Dworkin

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. — Henry A. Wallace

The State is not the hope of the world; it is an institution grounded in the threat of violence, whether via capital punishments or petty bureaucratic intrusions. — Douglas Wilson

The premise that America's power and influence was rooted in its wealth was wrong to begin with. To the contrary, our strength comes from America's magical stuff. It is something intangible, something invulnerable, something no measure of evil, no amount of violence or bloodshed can destroy. — Rick Elkin

The era of revolution by military means produced a greater degree of desperation and frustration. This was brought to an end by the people. — Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society. — Rebecca Solnit

And then I heard the ring of metal on concrete, and I went cold, because one of them had found a piece of rebar lying around, and I knew with sudden certainty that these guys were going to kill me right here on this stupid sidewalk, for nothing, without even the reason of knowing my name or hating my politics. They were just going to kill me because they needed to kill something, and I was handy.
At least zombies would have had a reason. — Rachel Caine

One moment it was there, another moment it is gone. One moment we are here, and another moment we have gone. And for this simple moment, how much fuss we make! How much violence, ambition, struggle, conflict, anger, hatred, just for this small moment! Just waiting for the train in a waiting room on a station, and creating so much fuss: fighting, hurting each other, trying to possess, trying to boss, trying to dominate - all that politics. And then the train comes and you are gone forever. — Rajneesh

The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Over the years I had convinced myself that brutality required motive, but this is a fool's deceit. Cruelty is the motive; religion and politics and resources are simply the cloth man weaves to curtain his desires for violence. — Lee Thomas

It is useful to remember that no matter where we turn, there is rarely any shortage of elevated ideals to accompany the resort to violence. — Noam Chomsky

Anti-violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police. This has proven to be a significant turn because the police are, ironically, the embodiment of patriarchy, racism, and the enforcement of the US class system. John — Sarah Schulman

Terrorism n.
Violence for political purposes or the politically motivated threat of violence which, either intentionally or unintentionally, challenges the state's monopoly on political violence. — Leslie Starr O'Hara

The SNCC base of operation, at the corner of Jackson and High Streets, was in the heart of the black community in Montgomery. I don't remember too much else about the city, but I'll always remember that corner. There were hundreds of young people behind police barricades of some sort. Lots of college students, some white, from up North, and some local black folks and college students. The whole Selma-to-Montgomery push, and this ancillary thrust by SNCC in Montgomery, was because on the other side of that barricade there were white folks who had shown they would stop at nothing, including violence, to protect white supremacy. — Junius Williams

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the
state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion,
of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the
fashionable idols! — Ludwig Von Mises

To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence. — Tariq Ali

The Media: bold sex and violence, timid politics and morals. — Mason Cooley

The 'realist' conception of continuing old-fashioned 'balance of power' politics may have been well founded in the past, but it is inconsistent with our increasing interdependent world. On moral grounds alone there can be no justification for the 20th century level of killing. To settle disputes without violence must become the primary goal of foreign policy for every nation. — Robert McNamara

... In view of the violence of political power responsibility must always prevail. The only possible synthesis between conviction and responsibility is thus one in which passion is subordinated to responsibility, so that political responsibility is the primary value to be pursued with passion, thereby engendering what H. H. Bruun terms a 'responsible ethic of conviction.' Weber states: 'To be sure, mere passion, however genuinely felt, is not enough. It does not make a politician, unless passion as devotion to a "cause" also makes responsibility to this cause the guiding star of action. — Nicholas Gane

If there is any political moral to be found in this world," Stencil once wrote in his journal, "it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouses of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.
"What of the real present, the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly 'alienated' populace within not many more years. — Thomas Pynchon

I can only imagine that future generations will consider us to have been barbaric for our intolerance of differences. — Cathy Burnham Martin

That's one reason why a civil war is worse than any other sort. When two parties in a given country resort to arms to settle political differences, every man is a potential enemy to every other man, and the distinction between legalized killing and murder is not clearly drawn in the minds of average men, who are incapable of sustained thought. Death is held to be a fitting reward for those who dare hold contrary views, and a nation involved in a civil war is a breeding ground for children reared to look with tolerance on next to nothing but violence. — Kenneth Roberts

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future. — Noam Chomsky

Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high? — Andrea Dworkin

Military strategy...has become the diplomacy of violence. — Thomas C. Schelling

Nothing can be changed in the system when the system itself is revolting against those who opposed violence. — Nilantha Ilangamuwa

There can be no better measure of our governance than the way we treat our children, and no greater failing on our part than to allow them to be subjected to violence, abuse or exploitation. — Jessica Lange

The decisive means for politics is violence. — Max Weber

Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners. — Geoffrey Miller

I, on the other hand, interrupt people because my thoughts fly out of my mouth. My handbag's full of rubbish. And I want to do something that matters with my life. Right now I'd like to write plays, sing in musicals, and/or rid the world of poverty, violence, cruelty, and right-wing conservative politics. — Alison Larkin

Of course, in the reality of history, the Machiavellian view which glorifies the principle of violence has been able to dominate.Not the compromising conciliatory politics of humaneness, not the Erasmian, but rather the politics of vested power which firmly exploits every opportunity, politics in the sense of the "Principe," has determined the development of European history ever since. — Stefan Zweig

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. — William James

Saddam's politics was the politics of the thug, of violence from the outset of his reign. Realism suggests that some people are not going to be tractable in response to purely peaceable overtures. Indeed, it certainly appears that some individuals, including notably Saddam Hussein, will cheerfully help themselves to a yard for every inch offered by well-meaning peacemakers. When we are dealing with customers as tough as that, there is no alternative to being tough ourselves. — Jan Narveson

If the tradition which claims that war may be justified does not also admit that it could be unjustified, the affirmation is not morally serious. A Christian who prepares the case for a justified war without being equally prepared for hte negative case has not soberly weighted the prima facie presumption that any violence is wrong until the case for an exception has been made. — John Howard Yoder

You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse; I'm not going to be greedy.' Unless you're able to do that you're stuck with adversarial politics that leads nowhere and creates ever greater violence. — Pankaj Mishra

They were endowed with the qualities of youth- they were rebellious, fearless, eager to fight for a 'just cause', thirsty for adventure and action. They were also irresponsible, ignorant, and easy to manipulate- and prone to violence. Only they could give Mao the immense force that he needed to terrorize the society. — Jung Chang

All my life I've been involved with racial politics. I was a Freedom Rider in the South. I was the author of books on gang violence, I was a community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, and when I spoke to the Black Caucus, congressional and state, I realized they were going all the way for Hillary [Clinton] and so was the Latino caucus in Sacramento and I asked myself this question: "Do I really want to cast my vote against these people who have been central to my life and to the soul of the country?" And so I went with them. Period. — Tom Hayden

Cryptography shifts the balance of power from those with a monopoly on violence to those who comprehend mathematics and security design. — Jacob Appelbaum

The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent ... The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd. — Philip Gourevitch

The kind of violence, looting, destruction that we saw from a handful of individuals in Baltimore, there's no excuse for that, that's not a statement, that's not politics, that's not activism, it's just criminal behavior. — Barack Obama

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city. — Toni Morrison

The dogged effort to "denaturalize" gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of "real" politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. — Judith Butler

He's too reasonable," Janice said.

"I agree. But the president's campaign advisors understand controlled violence. They realize that war unites us, brings us together. Yellow ribbons, Support Our Troops, all that. Little wars help win elections, provided they're short. — Phil Harvey

I'm not criticizing how people experience what they might call spirituality. I am interested in looking critically at something else - at how people use their language to articulate theories about something they call religion, to say, for example, that "in Islam religion and politics necessarily go together," or to insist that "violence has no place in religion," to universalize it. — Talal Asad

During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called "soldier's heart."8 The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another's integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions. — Parker J. Palmer

They [left-wingers] willy-nilly throw around the accusation of Nazism and comparisons to Hitler whenever confronted by any opposition, yet they are today's Nazis in their determination to shut down by threats or violence free speech and assembly. — Steve McCann

The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205) — Geoffrey Nunberg

The worst kind of tyrant is one that is righteously wrong — Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

Politics is a substitute for violence. — Dick Gephardt

Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable. — Pankaj Mishra

Anything Freed with Guns will Go Back Eventually. — Vineet Raj Kapoor

Gandhi Topi' is no longer an attire of the pacifist. — Mukesh Kwatra

And if Sarah Palin whose Web site put and today scrubbed bull's-eyes targets on 20 Representatives, including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part - however tangential - in amplifying violence and violent imagery in American politics, she must be dismissed from politics. She must be repudiated by the members of her own party. And if they fail to do so, each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully foretelling. And they must in turn be dismissed by the responsible members of their own party. — Keith Olbermann

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education. — George Orwell

Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for all of mankind. — Mike Norton

Truth and reason are eternal. They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail; however, in times and places they may be overborne for a while by violence, military, civil, or ecclesiastical. — Thomas Jefferson

We were raised with that discussion about violence and non-violence, and we all pretty much came up on the side of non-violence. That became my foundation with politics and my livelihood. — Joan Baez

1. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better make sure kids can't get guns.
2. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better find out what's making these kids want to kill, fix that, and then they won't want to use guns to kill teachers and classmates.
See what I did there? Which statement makes more sense? Don't bring up politics. Don't refer to statistical data. Don't nervously look at your cell phone. Just read the two statements and be honest with yourself. We can do better. We're smarter than this. WAKE UP. — Aaron B. Powell

The federal air marshal, the passengers, the flight crew, and the pilots are truly the last line of defense. American public spaces and schools need the same approach. Let's cut the feel-good politics and recognize that by the time someone with dangerous plans reaches your doorstep, it's too late to ponder root causes of antisocial behavior - it's time to act! All of the thinking should have been done beforehand. And the level of commitment to stop grotesque violence in its tracks - stone cold dead - has to exceed theirs if protecting the principal is going to succeed. — Gary J. Byrne

He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificiently isolated from loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself? — Teju Cole

My sense of politics and justice was deeply shaped in adolescence by my involvement with the underground punk - rock scene, and though lots of social and political issues had come forth in my comics, it wasn't until my late 20s that I felt properly equipped to address certain issues of race, power, and violence in my work. — Nate Powell

Acknowledging that a woman's right to be safe from a gender-based attack was a "civil right," I believed, was critically important in changing the American consciousness. When a right reaches the status and categorization of a "civil right," it means the nation has arrived at a consensus that is nonnegotiable. Violence against women would no longer be written off ... Once our criminal justice system
at the local, state and federal levels
recognized these as serious and inexcusable crimes, women could stop blaming themselves. — Joe Biden

But transitions from the politics of violence to democratic compromise are always messy. — Timothy Garton Ash

A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. — Max Weber

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime. — Max Stirner

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up. — Steven Pinker

The vision I see is not only a movement of direct democracy, of self- and co-determination and non-violence, but a movement in which politics means the power to love and the power to feel united on the spaceship Earth ... — Petra Kelly

You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done. — Kofi Annan

Invisible violence in Pakistan, violence against brown people, ongoing violence in Iraq - that's got to be quantified in the same way as the cinematic glamorous violence that happens in recognisable cities. — Russell Brand

As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the "sacredness of human life" remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains. — Leon Trotsky

But since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed many times that number of people in Pakistan. Tens of thousands have died here in terror and counterterror violence, slain by bombs, bullets, cannons, and drones. America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24/7/365. The battlefield has been displaced. And in Pakistan it is much more bloody. — Mohsin Hamid