Quotes
There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.
p. 263
No one deserves brutality because of what they are, their condition of birth, including being born female; and the women in this book are not asking for it—instead they are risking as much as any man risks to live, to love.
... and my soldiers, they say, make idols of their swords. But does not the sword make certain? Does not the sword make plain? Does not the sword compel kindness from those who kneel in its shadow? I need no other God.
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
Having been bullied as a new boy, he bullied others when they seemed unhappy or weak, not because he was cruel but because it was the proper thing to do.
Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.
p. 2
Henriksen: You only use deadly force when necessary—but when it's necessary, you do use it.
Violence creates nothing but violence, no matter what we call it and what the excuse. And so it goes, down all the centuries.
p. 423
“Violent men believe only in such concepts as ‘weakness’ and ‘cowardice’. They are so deeply cynical , so rooted in their own insane beliefs, that they cannot even begin to grasp the concept of ‘pacifism’.”
p. 214
If the people at the top think that reaching for a gun will solve the problem, why shouldn’t the people at the bottom think the same?
Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.
He had the decency to be appalled by his own brutality.
