Thomas Jefferson Quotes

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

… the blood flowing from those quivering black bodies as the hippopotamus-hide whip struck again and again; the savage soldiers rushing hither and thither, burning villages; the ghastly tally of severed hands.

No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified.

Everywhere the Bulgarians have passed, one sees only blood, dishonor and ruin. It is a refinement of cruelty which the imagination refuses to comprehend.

Exterminate all brutes.

Savage, despicable evil. That's what we were fighting in Iraq. That's why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy 'savages.' There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.

War is at its best barbarism.

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

History is a bath of blood.

Everywhere Bulgarians had passed, one sees only blood, dishonor and ruin …. It is a refinement of cruelty which the imagination refuses to comprehend.

They [the English] have not, it is true, taken into their own hands the hatchet and the knife, devoted to indiscriminate massacre, but they have let loose the savages armed with these cruel instruments; have allured them into their service, and carried them to battle by their sides, eager to glut their savage thirst with the blood of the vanquished and to finish the work of torture and death on maimed and defenseless captives.

Some of our men cut off the heads of their enemies … others tortured them longer by casting them into flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city …. In the Temple and Porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to the knees and bridle reigns.

The barbarian nation of the Huns, became so great that more than a hundred cities were captured. There were so many murders and blood-lettings that the dead could not be numbered.

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. ..And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man"--with his mouth.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

Human beings can do some God-awful things to other human beings

War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?

Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

People are essentially red meat. They are.

War is not civilized.

Combat is a piece of war. But war is a totalizing, uncivilized experience.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

In violence, we forget who we are.