Violence Escalation Quotes

[On appeasement:] If you let a bully come into your front yard, he'll be on your porch the next day and the day after that he'll rape your wife in your own bed.

Violence should not always beget more violence.

Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love.

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atom bomb.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

People are becoming more bestial on both sides – and the full weight of responsibility for this rests on that party, which in the name of socialism blasphemously sanctified the cold-blooded execution of unarmed prisoners, which hypocritically protests against whiteguard executions in Finland while Russian soil is being drenched in the blood of the victims of firing squads.

What is gained by violence must be lost before superior violence.

The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.

War cannot be used as a means to prevent or abolish wars. ... The idea of a war to prevent war is one of its oldest, and cruelest, tricks.

The senior officer who met with reporters in Baghdad said there had been 21 car bombings in the capital in May, and 126 in the past 80 days. All last year, he said, there were only about 25 car bombings in Baghdad.

In early times, it was easier to control a million people than to kill a million. Today, it is infinitely easier to to kill a million people than to control a million.

Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

In a world which is armed to its teeth with nuclear weapons, every quarrel or difference of opinion may lead to violence of a kind quite different from what is possible today.

We've got a very difficult situation created by this embrace of the so-called Arab Spring. And that's not getting better. It's getting worse. The carnage for the people of Syria is horrific, and it's quite frankly too little, too late to reverse a lot of that.

Today, words. Tomorrow, sticks and stones. And the day after that?

War is the most powerful narcotic ever invented by humankind. The more you seek it out the more powerful it becomes.

This is an unprecedented pace of terror in modern times. And so, to say they're on the run absolutely defies reality.

The sight of blood to crowds begets the thirst of more, As the first wine-cup leads to the long revel.

The destruction of civilian hamlets, the killing and the wounding of civilians, became vastly greater than it had been before, and it was very upsetting; but I still couldn't bring myself to understand that the policy itself was wrong.

To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.

The step from one degree of violence to the next is imperceptibly taken and cannot be easily taken back.... Wars have a way of getting out of hand.

The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

Little crimes breed big crimes. You smile at little crimes and then big crimes blow your head off.

In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellow men on a single plane---the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times a bloody as it was before