William Golding Quotes

How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur or feathers?

Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.

I killed a squirrel once with a car. Twice with a tennis racket.

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

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

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."

First, I blow a hole in your face; then I go back inside, and sleep like a baby... I guarantee you.

I have been cut in two.

An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame, how can they still hold their heads among human beings?

Use your head; cut off theirs.

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.

If people are being abused or even killed during an arrest, this is highly disturbing.

American Indians would, you know, scalp them and desecrate the bodies, you know, tie them to cactuses or bury them in anthills or things like that, and you know, cut up the bodies and stuff. And then the other enemy soldiers would come across and find their comrades laying there, ripped apart, and they would be sickened by it and it would scare them.

She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did . . . It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minute.

Soccer just couldn't satisfy my thirst for watching violence up close.

England is, after all, the land where children are beaten, wives and babies bashed, football hooligans crunch, and Miss Whip and Miss Lash ply their trade as nowhere else in the western world.

The mere athlete becomes too much of a savage.

...to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state

The cutting of heads is become so much a la mode, that one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders.

Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details.

Those who enjoy the emotion of hating are much like the groups who sate their thirst for blood by hunting and hounding to death helpless animals as an outlet for their emotions.

Witty closing remarks have been replaced by massive head trauma and severe hemorrhaging.

The men were wild as ourang-outans, and the women fit only to flog cattle.