My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

If we could just find out who’s in charge, we could kill him.

The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

The U.S. is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

War is the business of barbarians.

The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

China and the U.S. need each other very badly. Yes, we should argue about some things, but it’s not an ‚us versus them,‘ it’s an ‚us and them‘ type scenario.

The dropping of bombs on people – isn’t that terrorism?

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

I don’t see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that’s almost inconceivable.

The fact is, violence is not only not a beautiful thing, but it’s also very painful and not without consequences for the perpetrator as well as the victim.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.

The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.

The most violent show on TV is the six o’clock news.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

I think if someone gets kicked in the face it is their fault – they watched the foot come towards their face.

War settles nothing.

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it’s again not people who are intrinsically evil.

Sir one more comment like that and I will strangle you with my microphone wire!

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.

Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the ’90s.

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.

Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.

Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

The United States is a violent military state. It’s been involved in military action all over the place.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.

Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

It is the failing of youth not to be able to restrain its own violence.

No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.

I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

I’ll beat him so bad he’ll need a shoehorn to put his hat on.

Violent means will give violent freedom. That would be a menace to the world and to India herself.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.

It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

Obviously, there’s a part of me that takes the world of violence and death very seriously. However, when it comes to protection, or when it comes to just the skill of shooting… I’ve gone to the range with sniper rifles and things like that.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

I have long understood that losing always comes with the territory when you wander into the gambling business, just as getting crippled for life is an acceptable risk in the linebacker business. They both are extremely violent sports, and pain is part of the bargain. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.