Thomas Bernhard Quotes

As we move toward a new Middle East, over the years and, I think, over the decades to come, we will make a lot of people very nervous.

Without love, violence will change the world; it will change it into a more violent one.

You see, at the beginning we weren't fighters. We weren't yellers or throwers, even if we eventually came to be. It would take time and much deeper wounds for us to get to that point.

Leadership is birthed out of anger!

Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

Never mind a world That can't see past brutality Answers are getting the gas Live gestures Have constantly been used As weapons

War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.

War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game.

Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life from one moment to the next. But there's the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

Democracy cannot sustain itself amid a high degree of violence.

We cannot change ideas in the minds of men and races with machine guns or battle ships.

Of course, let us have peace, we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties ... " There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.

And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again. The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you'd relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays.

War with all its glorification of brute force is essentially a degrading thing.

Democracy and violence can ill go together.

There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.

The terrorists, they have the wrong perception. They believe that the other group is trying to destroy them as a religion, as a civilization. So they want to abolish us, to kill us before we can kill them. And the antiterrorist may think very much the same way - that these are terrorists and they are trying to eliminate us, so we have to eliminate them first. Both sides are motivated by fear, by anger, and by wrong perception.

if you learn to hate one or two persons... you'll soon hate millions of people.

Fair peace is becoming to men; fierce anger belongs to beasts.

A revolution in itself is not a blessing.