Violence Gets You Nowhere Quotes & Sayings

There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile to continue talking about peace and non-violence against a government whose only reply is savage attacks on an unarmed and defenceless people. — Nelson Mandela

Violence just hurts those who are already hurt ... Instead of exposing the brutality of the oppressor, it justifies it. — Cesar Chavez

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Violence has been Nicaragua's most important export to the world. — Ronald Reagan

We have been marching for the last one hundred and fifty years. We sacrifice our individual liberties, and sometimes we fail and suffer. Sometimes we divide into separate groups and our methods conflict, though we all aim at one common goal. The significant thing is that we march on without turning back. What we want is peace not violence, We know that we thrive and prosper only in peace. — Carlos Bulosan

[This is] the basis of the Innocent Woman Defense the Innocent Woman Principle:;: Women are believed when they say they are innocent of violence and most easily doubted when they say they are guilty of violence. — Warren Farrell

Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.

Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have. — Molly Crabapple

I think violence in a cinematic context can be, if handled in a certain way, very seductive. — Kathryn Bigelow

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence ... — Marcel Proust

In the Eroica and other pieces of his middle years, Beethoven hailed the enlightened leader, the benevolent despot, the military spirit. Now for him the military spirit is nothing but destruction. By the end of this section the bugles are raging, the drums roaring, the choir crying Dona pacem! in terror. Now we understand what Beethoven meant by "prayer for inner and outer peace." The inner peace is that of the spirit. The outer peace is in the world. The fear and trembling in the Missa solemnis is not the fear of losing salvation in eternity; it is the human, secular fear of violence and chaos. — Jan Swafford

States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one. — Steven Pinker

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.
Such is the logic of patriotism. — Emma Goldman

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. — Alice Walker

The link between intimate violence in the home and the international violence of terrorism and war is as tightly bound together as the fingers of a clenched fist. — Riane Eisler

Every creature is born with a potential store of violence. — R.K. Narayan

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary with age, enfeebled, dry. So more the things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back though the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come out of the rain. — John Knowles

If we neglect or abandon those who are suffering in poverty ... not only are we depriving ourselves of potential opportunities for markets and economic growth, but ultimately that despair may turn to violence that turns on us. — Barack Obama

I spend my time on Crimewatch appealing for criminals on the run. Domestic violence is one of the few crimes I can think of where the victim is often forced to go on the run. — Fiona Bruce

The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought. — John Keegan

The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who have studied the character and personality of these men, or who have come in close contact with them, are agreed that it is their super-sensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes. The most noted writers and poets, discussing the psychology of political offenders, have paid them the highest tribute. Could anyone assume that these men had advised violence, or even approved of the acts? Certainly not. Theirs was the attitude of the social student, of the man who knows that beyond every violent act there is a vital cause. — Emma Goldman

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender. — Rebecca Solnit

All beings tremble before violence. All love life. All fear death. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do? — Gautama Buddha

The most brutal form of domestic violence is the violence against unborn children, and this particular bill would prohibit abortions after the fetus feels pain, which is 20 weeks and older. — Joseph Fischer

It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died. — Roberto Bolano

Wherever arms flow, violence follows. Bullets replace ballots as the solution to political disputes. — Michael Douglas

Violence existed before our music was even suggested. — Big Pun

You can't know its mind, and you can't control it. This creature is nothing but war incarnate. If you traffic with it, you bring war into your house, and violence down upon yourself. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. — James Madison

You know what I think about violence. For me it is profoundly moral -more moral than compromises and transactions. — Benito Mussolini

I recognize no empire of this present age. — Paul Speratus