Masha Gessen Quotes

Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.

Violence is a commodity in the U. S. and the culture of violence is toxic.

My dad was a violent alcoholic. Really aggressive.

We recognize that violence is a learned behavior. One of the best classrooms for learning violence is in the home.

I don't want to get punched all my life.

Violence is violence. Trauma is trauma. And we are taught to downplay it, even think about it as child's play.

As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.

Where I'm from, they'll beat your head until it gets back down to normal size.

I have been touched by extreme violence, and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil.

You know, what we do know is that there is a high frequency of violence in the home of those who bully.

A lot of my friends were gay, so I was spat on on the bus daily, and I ended up in hospital a couple of times from being beaten up so badly.

Now, I am not saying that there is one single type of individual who is a better type of terrorist than another. What I am saying is that the circumstances that push certain individuals over the edge, to become terrorists, are generally very, very similar.

Mother beat the hell out of us. She'd have wild outbursts.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its anyone's natural makeup to be a violent brawler.

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

I've seen a lot of political violence in my life. I know what it looks like. I know what it smells like. I know what motivates young men to do it. I've talked to them about it. I know what victims feel like, you know? I know the abominable effect it has on politics. I know how intractable it is.

The harassment and the bullying that students face is a learned behavior.

Once, in high school, on a field trip away from school, some girls brought razors to shave their legs and threw them at me and told me to kill myself. But they were all insecure. They were angry, snapping at everybody.

The thing about a violent kid is that he can't play imaginatively.

In fact, most people who are bullies are people who have been abused in one way or the other in some other part of their life, and somebody who is bullied at school might come home and bully their younger siblings or their cousins or other people in their neighborhood, or in cyberspace.

I grew up getting bullied and fighting a lot.

I love those sorts of stories where you actually see the consequences of what violence does physically to people as well as psychologically.

I see violence in myself; I've done some pretty violent things in my lifetime and I've been around some pretty severe violence all the way up to homicide.

Once I beat a guy, mentally and physically, hes never the same.