Quotes about violence

They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!

“Organized mayhem,” Nick commented, “seems to be the chief preoccupation of intelligent species everywhere.”

We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women, preferentially mate with champions of human combat. When it’s the "right" type of aggression, we love it.

Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control.

That was how he did it. He was never just a thug. Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

“I haven’t faith in people any longer, old friend,” Nohadon said. “Put two men together, and they will find something to argue about. Gather them into groups, and one group will find reason to oppress or attack another.”

That evening he talked about Leonardo and Michelangelo. It is impossible to place them in the human world, he said. It is impossible to comprehend how anything that attests to greatness has survived; it is obviously a result of innumerable chance events and of human incomprehension, he said. If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago. Fortunately, people have lost their flair for greatness and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to point of greatness, he said.

The starting point is the recognition that throughout history, religion has been a cause of bloodshed, and it remains so today. Because religion has contributed to the world's problems, it must develop specific and practical ways to help solve those problems.

In the Middle East, Iraq, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, and many other places in the world, religion has been so divisive that people have killed one another, believing they were doing the work of God.

“I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”

“I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”

“What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”

What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hogwash about students at college having to be treated as adults—there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!

Why did virtually every culture reward its men for enduring violence? So it would have a cadre of people available to protect it in war.