Abel Ferrara Quotes

Violence is man re-creating himself.

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

Why do people want to kill and maim and pillage? We're all in it together.

We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace.

Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

War,--the trade of barbarians!

War is a foolish, childish, animalistic, unthinking, unintelligent way of trying to accomplish a purpose.

Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.

Peace for any prolonged period of time is impossible. Humans have a natural thirst for chaos and war is the most readily available form of chaos.

There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.

Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

Combat is a piece of war. But war is a totalizing, uncivilized experience.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

Violent means will give violent freedom. That would be a menace to the world and to India herself.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

Men are fighting... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.

Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.