Sunday, January 10, 2021 – These Violent Times
All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished. ~ Marshall Rosenberg
Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe. ~ John Milton, Paradise Lost
Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed. ~ Gil Bailie
Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle of reason in the throat. ~ John Frederick Boyes
Let us thank God that we live in an age when something has influence besides the bayonet. ~ Daniel Webster
He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
I believe everybody in the world should have guns. Citizens should have bazookas and rocket launchers too. I believe that all citizens should have their weapons of choice. However, I also believe that only I should have the ammunition. Because frankly, I wouldn’t trust the rest of the goobers with anything more dangerous than string. ~ Scott Adams
There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness. ~ Sam Peckinpah
What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? ~ Alan Paton
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime. ~ Max Stirner
So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private citizens will occasionally kill theirs. ~ Elbert Hubbard
Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. ~ George Orwell
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. ~ George Orwell
Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don’t know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy. ~ Anthony Burgess
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one’s rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them. ~ Georges Bataille
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it. ~ Noam Chomsky
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. ~ Isaac Asimov
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. ~ Alice Walker
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
You have to show violence the way it is. If you don’t show it realistically, then that’s immoral and harmful. If you don’t upset people, then that’s obscenity. ~ Roman Polanski
Education is the vaccine for violence. ~ Edward James Olmos
I ain’t never liked violence. ~ Sugar Ray Robinson
We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict. ~ Jim Morrison
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me. ~ Hunter S. Thompson
Democracy don’t rule the world. You’d better get that in your head. This world is ruled by violence. But I guess that’s better left unsaid. ~ Bob Dylan
Maybe every other American movie shouldn’t be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence. ~ Bill Maher
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. ~ George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared. ~ Henri Nouwen
Violence is a calm that disturbs you. ~ Jean Genet
If an adult uses violence on a child, the child will naturally assume that he too, has the right to use it on one smaller or weaker. ~ Dora Russell
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. ~ Leonard Bernstein
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. ~ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
If everyone who had a gun just shot themselves, there wouldn’t be a problem. ~ George Harrison
Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. ~ G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps. ~ James Gilligan
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. ~ Dave Barry
Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around. ~ Dave Barry
If you hate what you’re seeing, you call it sex and violence. If you like it, you call it “romance and adventure.” ~ Joe Bob Briggs
In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool. ~ Katherine Dunn
It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. ~ Flaubert
I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface. ~ Mark Rothko
It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none. ~ Stokely Carmichael
I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. ~ John Lennon
They have the guns. We have the poets. Therefore, we will win. ~ Howard Zinn
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. ~ Naomi Klein
The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise. ~ Steven Pinker
It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. ~ Alexander Hamilton
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself. ~ Iris Murdoch
A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one. ~ Wallace Stevens
Just Above Sunset 