Cyclical Violence Quotes

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

This war [World War II] like the next war, is the war to end all wars.

We can forgive you for killing our children, but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children.

It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.

Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.

Black folks don't have a chance, so they are in the hood, dealing drugs, in a shoot-out. They do it again and one more time they are out.

When you kill somebody's little sister with a missile, he's going to hate you forever. And the next generation will hate you even more.

And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.

The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.

But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses têtes but now we know that there will be other grosses têtes and the will be all the same.

I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.

Defense is attack, attack is defense, each being the cause and result of the other.

'Moonlight' undoes our expectations as viewers, and as human beings, too. As we watch, another movie plays in our minds: real-life footage of the many forms of damage done to black men, which can sometimes lead them to turn that hateful madness on their own kind, passing on the poison that was their inheritance.

It's all a play. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen, there are hundreds of thousands of dead, and the curtain comes down, and that's the end of that. Then Korea happens. Vietnam happens, all that happened in Latin America happens. And every now and then, this curtain comes down and history begins anew. New moralities and new indignations are manufactured...in a disappeared history.

Yes, violence begets more violence, but historically this has been the way of the world.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

You can't right the wrongs because you'll never understand the cause and you'll be too busy dodging the effect.

Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.