Bruce Catton Quotes

Wild and frantic savages and collectively the greatest cowards I have ever encountered.

Wars and revolutions cannot be prescribed and the circle of their influence determined in advance.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

It's MMA, man, the wild, wild west. You can just expect that anything can happen, and that's just where I'm at with things.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

I own that there is a haughtiness and fierceness in human nature which will cause innumerable broils, place men in what situation you please.

I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.

Texas is not a civilized place. Texans shoot one another a lot. They also knife, razor, and stomp one another to death with some frequency. And they fight in bars all the time.

When the gun shoots, you got to go.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

I can remember a couple of real fights when I ran. Because they were kinda dangerous.

The mere athlete becomes too much of a savage.

Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot him and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.

Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.

We Americans, we're a simple people . . . but piss us off, and we'll bomb your cities.

Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.

One would think that man would run out of wars.

Nonviolence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute.

I can run fast when I want to run fast, and I've always been good at destroying things.

I was speaking to a writer the other day and he gave me a valuable piece of advice. He said that you may get to where you want to go quicker through violence, but the healing process takes longer. Whereas if you don't use violence, there is not much healing necessary, so you win in the long run.

Man is the cruelest animal.

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

It was beautiful in a harsh I'm-going-to-gut-you-like-a-fish kind of way.

The man running toward me is not a man, he is a boy. A shaggy-haired boy with a crease between his eyebrows. Will. Dull-eyed and mindless, but still Will. He stops running and mirrors me, his feet planted and his gun up. In an instant, I see his finger poised over the trigger and hear the bullet slide into the chamber, and I fire. My eyes squeezed shut. Can't breathe. The bullet hit him in the head. I know because that's where I aimed it.