Thomas Merton Quotes

We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.

At 17, the first time I saw a dead body, I froze. By 31 it was a natural occurrence for me, and no group of people should live like that.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

I think people are getting more and more - unfortunately - inured to violence. People are like, less sensitive to things they should wake up about.

mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

There's no way to escape the fact that we've grown up in a violent culture, we just can't get away from it, it's part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we've always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.

The fact is that trauma and risk taking hadn't become scarier over the years; it had become more normal.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

We're showing a situation that these kids are caught in and being forced to do but the violence is not glorified. Most of the kids in there are not wanting to be doing it.

If you woke up, every day, and someone punched you in the face, for the first week, you'd go, 'Why is someone punching me in the face?' But, by the time you got through week two, you'd take it and just go on with the day.

Violence is very much with us, and we like to see it. I doubt if you can change that, and I'm not sure you should want to. I have occasionally been very upset by something I was writing, but it's quite rare: I keep my writing very separate from my life.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.

Violence begets violence, and then you get leaders who are violent men. And you don't want that.

War is unsettling.

I think we have too much violence in wrestling, on TV in general, and society as a whole.

Everything that happens in the life of a human being, especially artists, who are supposed to be more sensitive, yes, it can affect you. In Lebanon I saw 10- and 12-year-old kids walking around with guns, and I understood how much human actions affect people.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it. I've done it before. It's no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it's all right. That's all. It's easy. You just slaughter them.

This bloody conflict has been going on for much too long. It is doing terrible things to Israelis, to Palestinians. One of the terrible things it is causing is indifference.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

I'm sorry, those pictures from the Abu Ghraib. At first, they, like infuriated me, I was sad. Then like, a couple days later, after they cut the guy's head off, they didn't seem like much. And now, I like to trade them with my friends.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

Mutilated corpses with a chance of afternoon showers. I got dressed and went to work.