Brutality Quotes - Page 6

• The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.

  George Steiner

  Freedom, Opposites, Four

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.311, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• He who does most to cure woman of her weakness, her frivolity, and her servility will likewise at the same stroke do most to cure man of his brutality, his selfishness and his sensuality.

  Frances Power Cobbe

  Men, Selfishness, Weakness

  Frances Power Cobbe (2010). “The Duties of Women: A Course of Lectures”, p.36, Cambridge University Press

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• There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

  E. M. Forster

  War, Mean, Self

  "Notes on the Way". Time and Tide Magazine, June 10, 1934.

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• No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.

  Emma Goldman

  Ignorance, Mean, Men

  "My Disillusionment in Russia". Book by Emma Goldman, 1925.

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• I must confess that I am deeply troubled. I fear that human beings are intent upon acting out a vast deathwish and that it lies with us now to make every effort to promote resistance to the insanity and brutality of policies which encompass the extermination of hundreds of millions of human beings.

  Bertrand Russell

  Lying, Effort, Insanity

  Bertrand Russell (1967). “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell”

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• This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

  Doris Lessing

  Strong, Thinking, Civilization

  Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• As for that footage, video footage showing the dead children allegedly killed in the chemical attack, it is horrible. The question is only who did it and what they did, and who is responsible for this. These pictures do not answer the questions I have just posed. There is an opinion that it's a compilation by these very rebels, who are connected with al-Qaida and who were always distinguished by exceptional brutality.

  Vladimir Putin

  Children, Gay, Rebel

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• In war it is necessary to kill as many people as possible -- such is the cynical logic of war. Brutality in a fight is unavoidable; have you seen how cruelly children fight in the streets?

  Maxim Gorky

  Children, War, Fighting

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• We must let the world know children’s stories and we must take effective protective, legal and political actions to ensure that as many children as possible are spared the brutalities of war. Our joint action has, and will, make a difference, if only we make the effort.

  Radhika Coomaraswamy

  Children, War, Differences

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• He could have a thousand faults, but I do not blame anyone in particular and I despise brutality with which the Nazis acted against Israelites; but the fault is not only of Hitler, but a group of high-ranked dignitaries.

  Augusto Pinochet

  Groups, Faults, Blame

  Interview, 1989.

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• [Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis.

  Antonin Artaud

  Art, Writing, Thrill

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• 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

  Ignorance, Character, Men

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.142, Beacon Press

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• This book is not a polemic treatise but a powerful, well-researched account that sensitizes any reader to the ways in which in-difference permits brutality and genocide.

  John M Swomley

  Powerful, Book, Differences

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• We don't call war hell because it is fought without restraint. It is more nearly right to say that, when certain restraints are passed, the hellishness of war drives us to break with every remaining restraint in order to win. Here is the ultimate tyranny: those who resist aggression are forced to imitate, and perhaps even to exceed, the brutality of the aggressor.

  Michael Walzer

  War, Winning, Order

  Michael Walzer (2015). “Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations”, p.50, Basic Books

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• 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

  School, Hands, Oil

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• 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

  Thinking, Certain, Delightful

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• Further, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of their seizure of the state, human rights violations, and brutalities. Without that desperately needed legitimacy, the dictators cannot continue to rule indefinitely.

  Gene Sharp

  Rights, May, Dictator

  Gene Sharp (2010). “From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation”, p.13, Albert Einstein Institution

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• I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat. It is only some carnivorous animals that have to subsist on flesh. Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures, and for hides and furs is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality . . . Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures.

  Dalai Lama

  Sports, Pain, Adventure

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• The same day I saw my first horror camp, I visited every nook and cranny. I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Home, Saws, Firsts

  DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER “Crusade in Europe”

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• 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

  Art, Successful, Law

  "'Hyper subtle sexual ego'". Interview with Peter Nowogrodzki, logger.believermag.com. June 4, 2014.

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• Jackson possessed the brutality essential in war; Lee did not. He could clasp the hand of a wounded enemy, whilst Jackson ground his teeth and murmured, 'No quarter to the violators of our homes and firesides', and when someone deplored the necessity of destroying so many brave men, he exclaimed: 'No, shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave.'

  J. F. C. Fuller

  War, Home, Men

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• Football is brutality. Football is career-ending, life-threatening injury just by stepping on the field.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Football, Careers, Fields

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• There should be a class on drugs. There should be a class on sex education-a real sex education class-not just pictures and diaphragms and 'un-logical' terms and things like that.....there should be a class on scams, there should be a class on religious cults, there should be a class on police brutality, there should be a class on apartheid, there should be a class on racism in America, there should be a class on why people are hungry, but there are not, there are classes on gym, physical education, let's learn volleyball.

  Tupac Shakur

  Volleyball, Religious, Sex

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• Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Hurt, Fun, Passion

  Andrea Dworkin (1989). “Pornography: men possessing women”, Plume

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• Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, Gun, Doe

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.316, Hamilton Books

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