Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.

In countries where innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.

By taking responsibility for how you choose to respond to anything or anyone, you’re aligning yourself with the beautiful dance of life.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

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.

In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also.

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

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.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

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.

The Spanish Empire eventually collapsed because of its expensive taste for warfare and conquest.

Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.

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.

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

Whoever conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself.

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

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

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

I sometimes just don’t like to see the Ultimate Fighting. I just find it, as a martial artist, I just find it too violent.

Gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible.

The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States – and war is what they got.

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.

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

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

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.

War settles nothing.

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.

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

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

Peace can only thrive when the climate is right. We remain open to bilateral dialogue with Pakistan on all outstanding issues in an environment free from terrorism and violence.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.

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.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Terrorists are not following Islam. Killing people and blowing up people and dropping bombs in places and all this is not the way to spread the word of Islam. So people realize now that all Muslims are not terrorists.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

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

We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur.

Hate crime is not new in the United States.

If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It’s hard to get off of that equilibrium.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

Every human has four endowments – self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.

It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don’t think anybody has held this job who hasn’t felt personally responsible for those being killed.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

War is the business of barbarians.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

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

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

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.

War is a contagion.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.