Collective Violence Quotes

One murder made a villain, Millions a hero. Princes were privileged To kill, and numbers sanctified the crime..

Riots born out of political issues aren't the same as those born out of personal greed.

the people are the biggest horror show on earth, have been for centuries.

The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.

Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

War is murder. And the military preparations now being made for a potential major confrontation are aimed at collective murder. In a nuclear age the victims would be numbered by the millions. This naked truth must be faced.

It is generally not known in the world that, in the years preceding 1916, there was a concerted effort made to eliminate all the Armenian people, probably one of the greatest tragedies that ever befell any group. And there weren't any Nuremberg trials.

Humans can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet they're potentially more vicious than any other. They are the only ones who can be persuaded to hate millions of their own kind whom they have never seen and to kill as many as they can lay their hands on in the name of their tribe or their God.

What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?

I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad.

There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane.

Whatever it is that leads human beings to hate, to destroy, and to kill has taken on a collective force like never before, as technology and globalization now give it the capacity to not just strike, but to strike us all, together, as one.

It is a pity that pogroms take place, but they uphold the morale of the army

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.

A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it?

A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred.

I think most generations tend to learn the lesson of war the hard way. There is a deep attraction to the empowerment. Freud is right: societies either become locked in a collective embrace of Eros, as individuals do, or a collective embrace of Thanatos, the death instinct. They swing between the two. The notion that societies are naturally prone toward self-preservation is wrong. Self-annihilation can be deeply addictive, intoxicating, enticing. So I take a darker view of human nature, that war is probably always going to be with us. I think history bears me out.

When the Bible and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do not merely 'take pity' on them. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities.

Lynching—unlike simple murder—is a form of collective violence in which individuals act with the explicit or implicit support of the community, or at least without its condemnation.

Everything, everything in war is barbaric…But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats.

We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?

One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness. It is sudden. It pounces.

Folk caught up in a riot aren't our cousins and sisters, our brothers and uncles. They are part of a big animal with many arms and claws, armed with stones and sticks.