Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game? J G Ballard
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
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Violence stops thought. Hence its popularity as a pain-killer. Mason Cooley
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance. Hannah Arendt
I’m a student of violence because I’m a student of the human heart. Sam Peckinpah
Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points. Leon Trotsky
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Martin Luther King, Jr
A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it. Lewis H Lapham
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
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime. Max Stirner
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
Frustration is the wet nurse of violence. David Abrahansen
The American dream is, in part, responsible for a great deal of crime and violence because people feel that the country owes them not only a living but a good living. David Abrahansen