Quotes about Violence

Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society.

Do not be careless.  Pray as much as you can - more frequently and more fervantly.  Prod yourself - force yourself to do so, for the Kingdom of God is taken by force.  You will never attain it without forcing yourself.

Saint Innocent of Alaska

Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.

A teacher of fear can’t bring peace on Earth. We have been trying to do it that way for thousands of years. The person who turns inner violence around, the person who finds peace inside and lives it, is the one who teaches what true peace is. We are waiting for just one teacher.

You’re the one.

Spiritual people can be some of the most violent people you will ever meet. Mostly, they are violent to themselves. They violently try to control their minds, their emotions, and their bodies. They become upset with themselves and beat themselves up for not rising up to the conditioned mind's idea of what it believes enlightenment to be. No one ever became free through such violence. Why is it that so few people are truly free? Because they try to conform to ideas, concepts, and beliefs in their heads. They try to concentrate their way to heaven. But freedom is about the natural state, the spontaneous and un-self-conscious expression of beingness. If you want to find it, see that the very idea of "a someone who is in control" is a concept created by the mind. Take one step backward into the unknown.

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.

No matter how famous the victim, no matter how powerful the advocates, it simply isn't always possible to control the conduct of other people.

Every day people engaged in the clever defiance of their own intuition become, in midthought, victims of violence and accidents. So when we wonder why we are victims so often, the answer is clear: It is because we are so good at it.

The worst outcrop of herd life [is] the military system, which I abhor.  That a man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him.  He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed.  This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed.  Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!  How vile and despicable war seems to me!  I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.

Irritation, frustration, annoyance, anger, rage and eventually violence are simply a function of not getting what I want. (On a sliding scale of magnitude of intensity)

People get violent when 3 things happen:

1. When their personal safety or survival is affected
2. When their family's safety or survival is affected
3. When their way of life is drastically affected

Then people have this survival instinct and they become violent.

When I see violence I ask myself the following questions: How can I make that person feel safe? How can I make that person feel safe with their family? How can I not interfere with their way of life?

If we could do this with our perceived enemies we would not have to have a war on terror.

Living in the modern age,
death for virtue is the wage.
So it seems in darker hours.
Evil wins, kindness cowers.

Ruled by violence and vice
we all stand upon thin ice.
Are we brave or are we mice,
here upon such thin, thin ice?

Dare we linger, dare we skate?
Dare we laugh or celebrate,
knowing we may strain the ice?
Preserve the ice at any price?

We are not innocent children victimized by a big bad world; if our world is big and bad, we made it that way. This is what the Buddha taught. The “other” is the child's boogeyman, the projection of our own fears onto a terrifying object of our imagination, which in turn terrorizes us. Our ignorance is not seeing that we are the other. We cannot afford to confuse innocence with this ignorance. Violence is not a permanent, immutable, fixed object. It is a state of mind, an expression of ignorance, with no more solid substance than a cloud. We cannot make a frontal attack on violence. Even protecting ourselves from it fuels its boogeyman existence. But the Buddha taught that we can change. This was his good news: that there is a way to alleviate suffering by freeing our minds from greed, anger, and ignorance. Yet until we apprehend the ways in which we are Oklahoma City, the bombs and the baby bears, the victims and the violators, we will continue to blame “them,” all the while proclaiming our innocence and evading our responsibilities.

"People try non-violence for a week, and when it 'does not work'
they go back to violence which hasn't worked for centuries.'

~~Theodore Roszak...

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs and other heads of states.

The kind of violence one should fear is always quiet and comes all wrapped up in words like Love until you live with it daily and you value only that which is valuable to the violator.

When one uses the simple monosyllabic 'France' one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When. . . we say 'France sent her troops to conquer Tunis'—we impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and- blood men and women who are the true actors.. . if we had no such word as 'France' . . . then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: 'A few of...thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.' This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the 'few'? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey? Empire-building is done not by 'nations,' but by men. The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each nation, who are directly interested in imperialism and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities pay the expenses and fight the wars.

Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.

It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence. The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek πόλις [city-state] down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.

Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d’être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man’s innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.

Democratic law does not say, "Thou shalt not kill". Instead, it designates certain people who have the right to kill -- soldiers and State police. Democratic law does not order, "Thou shalt not steal". It says that only certain people have the right to steal -- tax and customs agents. What does "power to the people" mean when the people enjoy fewer rights than their supposed servants?

Politics does not exist to eliminate violence but to legalise it. The only people who suggest making violence illegal are libertarians, and that is why libertarian principles are the most advanced in the evolution of humanity.

"Looking at why people treat each other so violently. We've always known that this violence comes from the urge humans fell to control and dominate one another, but only recently have we studied this phenomenon from the inside, from the point of view of the individual's consciousness. We have asked what happens inside a human being that makes him want to control someone else. We have found that when and individual walks up to another person and engages in a conversation, which happens billions of times each day in the world, one of two things can happen. That individual can come away felling string or feeling weak depending on what occurs in the interaction."

"We humans always seem to take a manipulative posture. No matter what the particulars of the situation, or the subject matter, we prepare ourselves to say whatever we want in order to prevail in the conversation. Each of us seeks to find some way to control and thus to remain on top in the encounter. If we are successful, or our viewpoint prevails, then rather than feel weak, we receive a psychological boost."

"In other words we humans seek to outwit and control each other not just because of some tangible goal in the outside world that we're trying to achieve, but because of a lift we get psychologically. This is the reason we see so many irrational conflicts in the world both at the individual level and the level of nations."

"The consensus in this matter is now emerging into public consciousness. We humans are realizing how much we manipulate each other and consequently we're reevaluating our motivations. We're looking for another way to interact. I think this reevaluation will be part of the new world view."

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

The contradiction of hiring an agency of institutionalized violence to protect us from violence is even more foolhardy than buying a cat to protect one's parakeet.

If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.

 

The Iranian Girl

There's a hole in the ground
A moving of earth, now made
A sad depression
Where once she played in
Puddle-rain
Splashing with the joy that comes
From child-like feet

The sound is still here
In the air, the breeze yet carrying
The secret laughter
That haunts the waking hours of those
Who've lost the way

How vain to think that
Memory can be erased

All will remember
No one escapes

I wonder if she saw it
The moment before
Her hair still flying free
The metal catching that last
Pure glint of sun

Did she hear the explosion
That made no sense
Did she feel
Her body come apart
And fall like dust, too soon

Does anyone ask
Whatever she felt, whatever she dreamed
Her dreaming time is gone
And no lofty word of God or
Glory will ever make it right

Dare to listen and you will
Hear her
Dare to open your eyes and see

The Iranian girl
No different
Like you, like me.

War, hatred, and violence all spring from one infernal idea: that one person, race, creed, or culture is better than another.

"If you try to fix violence with violence, you do nothing but create violence."

When individuals and groups do not experience being loved -- when whole communities lose hope that anyone cares -- fear and violence are often seized upon as seeming protectors in the form of gangs, mobs, and communal hostility.