Violence

• “In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”

• “Much of the sanctimonious abhorrence displayed by the ruling class and its apologists against the use of violence in the class struggle is rooted in the desire to maintain the integrity of its class monopoly of violence.”

• “It is the technique of the baboon to try to get its way by violence.”

• “To place the responsibility of violence on the illiterate, poor and unemployed mobs is to completely miss the pathologies amongst us, the privileged and the powerful, which are the greatest enablers of violence.”

• “People in favour of the use of force all think that it is just a means of attaining justice and peace. But peace and justice are free from violence...That is the final objective of history. If you abandon non-violence, you have no sense of history. You pass history by, you put history on ice, you are a traitor to history.”

• “Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Violence across IJR