All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.
Do not think of knocking out another person’s brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.
They say, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” But I think the guns help. Just standing there saying, “Bang!” doesn’t really hurt anybody.
If the solution to a problem of absolute disagreement extends to a call for bloodshed, then neither party has demonstrated the intelligence to formulate the question properly.
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
If a historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.
Each of us, we humans, if we are to look our own kind in the eye, should at least be willing to say we’re sorry, that all over our smaller and more lethal planet, whatever the causes, we’re still killing our own kind — the same but different, but our own kind nonetheless.
It’s not the bullet with my name on it that worries me. It’s the one that says, “To whom it may concern.”
Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. . . . The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul.
I’m all for gun control. Sometimes I shake a little; I’ve got to use two hands.
In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.
It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.
I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.
You have to want to lose your appetite for violence or aggression. And to do that, you have to lose your self-righteousness.
Even fighting in self-defense is wrong, though it is higher than fighting in aggression. There is no “righteous” indignation, because indignation comes from not recognizing sameness in all things.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
“Peacekeeper missile.” Doesn’t that sound like “ax-murderer baby sitter”?
The warrior energy of men now has to be used paradoxically to destroy the warrior psyche and the politics of warfare. It will require more courage and aggression than we’ve ever seen on the battlefield.
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. . . . Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
