Quotes About Brutality

“It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy
like a national oil company
held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.”

— Naomi Klein

“In the woods lay a bleeding angel in all her glory. Her arms posed gracefully above her head and her hair soaked in the mud, the blood and feces in which she lay. Dying, fading into the other realm, her form christened by the rain as though the trees had begun to weep upon her in sadness for the brutality she had endured. (The Children of Ankh series)”

— Kim Cormack

“The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.”

— Michael Kazin

“Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.”

— Thrity Umrigar

“The biggest threat against the survival of humanity is not brutality and unkindness, it is stupidity and selfishness.”

— M.F. Moonzajer

“In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire?”

— Hal Duncan

“We have reason. It is the entire meaning and purpose of Shangri-La. It came to me in a vision long, long ago. I foresaw a time when man exalting in the technique of murder, would rage so hotly over the world, that every book, every treasure would be doomed to destruction. This vision was so vivid and so moving that I determined to gather together all things of beauty and culture that I could and preserve them here against the doom toward which the world is rushing. Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other. The time must come, my friend, when brutality and the lust for power must perish by its own sword. For when that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here.”

— James Hilton

“Summer makes me suicidal. It sucks all the magick out of life, and even sleeping becomes an exercise in fruitless brutality. I cannot comprehend what it is in the souls who await this misery. Nothing worthwhile can survive the heat. The birds and the bees are harbingers of hell, ushering in a season of disease. There is nothing in these months that speaks to me. It conspires to keep me from ever reaching home.”

— Damien Echols

“Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don't ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.”

— Ayn Rand

“Sentiment and brutality, never one without the other, like fossils and oil.”

— Saul Bellow

“A number of the heads of the offices were slippery politicians of a low moral grade, themselves appointed under the spoils system, and anxious, directly or indirectly, to break down the merit system and to pay their own political debts by appointing their henchmen and supporters to the positions under them. Occasionally these men acted with open and naked brutality. Ordinarily they sought by cunning to evade the law.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“Contrary to popular wisdom, bullies are rarely cowards.
Bullies come in various shapes and sizes. Observe yours. Gather intelligence.
Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice.
Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable.
Which is worse: Scorn earned by informers? Misery endured by victims?
The brutal May have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed.
Let guile be your ally.
Respect earned by integrity cannot be lost without your consent.
Don't laugh at what you don't find funny.
Don't support an opinion you don't hold.
The independent befriend the independent.
Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty.”

— David Mitchell

“Nothing but brutality will get through to these people. Some evils should not be given a second chance.”

— Bella Forrest

“The person who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality quite as much as the honesty. Possibly more.”

— Richard J. Needham

“This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen.”

— Albert Claude

“Brutality and injustice made us raise our hands towards the sky for years; God didn't respond us, but drones came to our rescue.”

— M.F. Moonzajer

“Our world needs brutality and cruelty to sustain its equality and justice. Without it, handsome guys and beautiful ladies will fuck everyone they want. And we all ugly people will wait holding our dicks in our hands.”

— M.F. Moonzajer

“I'd seen glimpses of a different me. It was a different me because in those increments of time I thought I actually became a winner.
The truth, however, is painful.
It was a truth that told me with a scratching internal brutality that I was me, and that winning wan't natural for me. It had to be fought for, in the echoes and trodden footprints of my mind. In a way, I had to scavenge for moments of alrightness.”

— Markus Zusak

“The brutality that can take place in a crime film heightens the tenderness that can also be there.”

— Geoffrey S. Fletcher

“But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.”

— Seamus Heaney

“It is only our humanity that can deliver us from the brutality of our achievements.”

— Henry Rollins

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. a”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes.”

— Raymond Chandler

“WARREN: What should the cops do? RUTH TURNER: The police, if they behave in other places like they do here, are unfortunate tools of a power structure which has failed to understand the dynamics of protests, and not understanding anything about the people with whom they deal, have not been able to deal with the situation in any constructive way. That's why police brutality takes place, and of course, police brutality breeds more violence. I feel that, clearly, the police ought to step in to prevent loss of life and limb, but they should not be there to prevent loss of life and limb on one side only, as had been the case. At Murray Hill, where a mob rioted-a white mob, I'm happy to say-the police made no attempt whatsoever to curb them. This exemplifies the double standard of the police.”

— Robert Penn Warren

“But the "Get Tough America" policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of all destruction and killing, has earned us a name for obscene brutality, and cost the World the possibility of Germany's becoming a peaceful and intellectually fruitful nation in anything but the most remote future.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“I think that in the sexual act, as delightful as it can be, the very physical part of it is, yes, a hammering away. So it has a certain brutality.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

“You can hardly walk up to complete strangers and say, "Good for you! You've risked banishment and brutality and ostracism just to be together, and I applaud your choice! You're in the vanguard of social change, and even though it's hard on you, the generations that come after you will have an easier time of it because you were brave enough to fall in love." So instead I told them I liked their baby. It means the same thing, but it's more socially acceptable.”

— Sharon Shinn

“Eons of suffering, brutality and struggle have paved the way through the corridors of time to create this moment, where you exist as an exalted expression of life.”

— Bryant McGill

“The United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret.”

— Robert Parry

“Naive conclusions to draw from man's brutality! Because man is a brute, woman has to be locked up so that she will remain unharmed.”

— Hedwig Dohm

“Woman's ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.”

— Victoria Woodhull

“I mean, you always hope to have a part on every level, on every layer. For us it was very much a conversation about power and sexuality and brutality. And really all the issues that are in that world, in that space, come down to one word, which is masculinity.”

— Oren Moverman

“There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications ... How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?”

— Pauline Kael

“That's the brutality of a breakup, isn't it? The people leaving think they did everything possible, the people left behind think what is possible hasn't even been tested yet.”

— Laura Dave

“I'm interested in confronting police brutality and police abuse of cracking down on street performers and street artists, but also in valorizing street art as legitimate performance within the artistic sphere, where it's so often conflated with pan-handling and begging and not "successful" art. I want to change laws around street performance.”

— Kalan Sherrard

“The great victory of April 30 represents the triumph of the entire nation, of justice over brutality and of humanity over tyranny.”

— Ho Chi Minh

“There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.”

— Howard Zinn

“What I'm trying to tell people is that police brutality in the 'hood is nothing new. And the thing is that whether this guy, the cop killer in my song, is real or not, believe it, there are people at that point.”

— Ice-T

“I have only danced my life. As a child I danced the spontaneous joy of growing things. As an adolescent, I danced with joy turning to apprehension of the first realisation of tragic undercurrents; apprehension of the pitiless brutality and crushing progress of life.”

— Isadora Duncan

“No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

“Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chroniclednever before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights.”

— Stefan Zweig

“Meditation is not the pursuit of pleasure and the search for happiness. Meditation, on the contrary, is a state of mind in which there is no concept or formula, and therefore total freedom. It is only to such a mind that this bliss comes unsought and uninvited. Once it is there, though you may live in the world with all its noise, pleasure and brutality, they will not touch that mind.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality-thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.”

— Nelson Mandela

“What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior ... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.”

— Florence Nightingale

“Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of they hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is not. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might”

— Carson McCullers

“Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn't mean I'm anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.”

— Quentin Tarantino

“There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.”

— Charles Krauthammer

“In the long run even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas. Eventually the ideology that has won the support of the majority will prevail and cut the ground from under the tyrant's feet. Then the oppressed many will rise in rebellion and overthrow their masters.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“Reason ... contradicts the established order of men and things on behalf of existing societal forces that reveal the irrational character of this order for "rational" is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.”

— Herbert Marcuse