Gratuitous Violence Quotes

I'm very critical of crime novels that use gratuitous violence to shock readers when it isn't necessary. If that's all you have to offer as a writer, perhaps you're in the wrong job. ~ Michael Robotham

My moral compass swings far to the left, but when it comes to gratuitous violence, I have trouble. ~ Michael Biehn

The ten billion animals that are killed every year for meat and the virulent consequences of contemporary animal agricultural practices remain conspicuously absent from public discourse. How often have you seen media exposés on the violent treatment of farm animals and the corrupt practices of carnistic industry? Compare this with the amount of coverage afforded fluctuating gas prices or Hollywood fashion blunders. Most of us are more outraged over having to pay five cents more for a gallon of gas than over the fact that billions of animals, millions of humans, and the entire ecosystem are systematically exploited by an industry that profits from such gratuitous violence. And most of us know more about what the stars wore to the Oscars than we do about the animals we eat. ~ Melanie Joy

A little bit of gratuitous violence in a well-thought-out story is fine. ~ Ray Wise

What's lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what's a crusade? Something you make out of crosses - a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols. ~ Aldous Huxley

Thwart: to prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person. ~ Jim Butcher

Well, look, I was angry. I don't think I commit a lot of gratuitous violence, but this was war, and he was a jerk, and I made a mess of him. I threw him through a couple of doors, and he cried like a fucking baby. You know what they used to write on cannons? The last argument of kings. I guess you could say magic is the last argument of queens. ~ Lev Grossman

I tried not to think of all the horror movies featuring this exact scenario, soon to be followed by an abundance of gratuitous blood and gore. ~ M.A. George

Thwart," I said. "To prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person."
"I'm pretty sure that isn't the definition." Sarissa said.
"It is today. ~ Jim Butcher

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.
A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things - whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous. ~ George R R Martin

If you study the history of mankind, it seems to be a history of violence. Certainly the history of art, whether you look at paintings or movies or plays or whatever, is just a litany of murder and death. ~ Ethan Hawke

To achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go. ~ Winston Churchill

The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness. ~ Samuel Johnson

And how will this come to pass?' He paused and lowered his voice. ' In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear, And I am sorry it is so. It will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

Rape Culture is a culture where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggression and violence towards women is acceptable and often inevitable. ~ Roxane Gay

Joe learned to view the comic book hero in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not all violence and retribution in the early stories of Kavalier Clay; Joe's work also articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums, and playground goats. ~ Michael Chabon

In January 1995 three prisoners, two category 'A' prisoners and a lifer escaped from Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. After four days of freedom they were recaptured. My length of freedom far surpassed theirs. ~ Stephen Richards

Domestic violence is not just perpetrated by a husband or a partner. Families too are a party to it. To my mind, violation of basic human rights by anybody around us – a parent, a sibling or a relative – is domestic violence. ~ Balroop Singh

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom
freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves. ~ Anton Chekhov

The collapse of the state in this large swathe of Africa meant that its people either relied on the charity of outsiders or took to violence. I must have looked bit dejected because Louise tried to lighten my mood. 'From my point of view as a church worker,it's great.'she said.When I go on leave back to the UK and I go into a church on Sunday,I am the youngest person there by a long way. But here in the Congo,I am always the oldest. ~ Tim Butcher

the only way to stop the violence and abuse that surrounds us is to talk about it. ~ Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Despite attending a nominally Christian school, I had not yet been inside a church - and I wasn't about to dare the deed now. I knew very little about the religion. It had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools. ~ Yann Martel

Stop looking for that person you were in the past. She has changed. Look for the person she has grown into. She is wiser and stronger than than ever before. Don't go back to who you were. Cherish who you are." --Without a Voice by Chris Pepple ~ Chris Pepple

In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multiplication tables. They hold images of sexuality and violence and beauty. They hold the memories of flesh that no longer exists. They hold metaphors: mitochondria, starfish, Hitler's-brain-in-a-jar, hell realm. They dream. Structures that were neurons twitch and loop and burn and dream. Images and words and pain and fear, endless. ~ James S.A. Corey

When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman target video game violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions that give rise to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies that make it harder for most of us to own our own homes, and the development practices which pave over the old grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear; rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement. ~ Henry Jenkins

What gets called 'the sixties' left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems the most fundamental and most pervasive in all the ensuing changes is the loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of science, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The Solent was one the worse stretches of sea in England; the current and tides were atrocious, but it was summer and this time the currents and tides were predictable. However, I did not know this; I picked a spot that I could see from the phone, where I would swim from. ~ Stephen Richards

Violence is not inevitable. I mean, the only inevitable form of violence is the kind that we understand, the only legitimate (if there can ever be legitimate violence) and that's self-defense. ~ Gloria Steinem

The irony is that the opposite is true: available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy. They might actually hang around long enough to get to know us. They could melt our defenses, not through violence but through love. This is what the ego doesn't want us to see. Available people are frightening. They threaten the ego's citadel. The reason we're not attracted to them is because we're not available ourselves. ~ Marianne Williamson

The use of violence as an instrument of persuasion is therefore inviting and seems to the discontented to be the only effective protest. ~ William O. Douglas

Essentally combat is an expression of hostile feelings. But in the large-scale combat that we call war hostile feelings often have become merely hostile intentions. At any rate, there are usually no hostile feelings between individuals. Yet such emotions can never be completely absent from war. Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves as a more or less substitute for the hatred between individuals. Even when there is no natural hatred and no animosity to start with, the fighting itself will stir up hostile feelings: violence committed on superior orders will stir up the desire for revenge and retaliation against the perpetrator rather than against the powers that ordered the action. It is only human (or animal, if you like), but it is a fact. ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

It's not your fault you had an unwanted dick in you. ~ Rebecca O'Donnell

Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging. ~ Hugh Howey

Police violence, I noted, was directly proportional to police boredom, and not to any resistance offered by protestors. ~ J.G. Ballard

The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media - so influential on impressionable young girls - that have been allowed, for millenia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women's sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire. ~ Anna Kessel

Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind ("cross this line and I will shoot you," "one more word out of any of you and you're going to jail"). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. ~ David Graeber

Men who, in their hearts, really care no more for mankind than See-wise cared for the fish, lift their voices in shouts of a spurious humanity, in order to raise themselves to power, on the shoulders of an excited populace. Bloodshed, domestic violence, impracticable efforts to attain an impossible perfection, and all the evils of a civil conflict are forgotten or blindly attempted, in order to raise themselves in the arms of those they call the people. ~ James Fenimore Cooper

I believe in the violence of not knowing. ~ Andrew Zawacki

I have quite a story to tell you," Parke said with a dramatic flair. "Sit back with that 'coke' and listen to the tale I'm about to spin. It's a grand one, full of action, suspense, intrigue, violence, and even some juicy stuff. Just what a good story should have, don't ya' think? ~ Derek Hart

Rome has betrayed itself. It knew the truth and chose violence, it knew humaneness and it chose tyranny. ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt

Gender segregated shelters are inaccessible to many trans people, and trans women in particular are often forced to choose between going into a men's shelter where they face enormous danger, or remaining street homeless and facing the violence, harassment, arrest, and exposure risks of that. ~ Dean Spade

I'm not a violent person. I'm not advocating violence. But I am an angry person. I'm advocating for more people to get angry. Get moved. ~ S.K. Ali

The level of violence on the planet today is no longer sustainable. ~ Marianne Williamson

I'd love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they'd get so violent that people would get bored of it. ~ Eli Roth

While most people view physical violence as a more serious offense than psychological violence, both battered women and prisoners of war report that threat of physical violence is more psychologically debilitating than actual physical violence. Emotional abuse, such as the threat to maim or kill, is often perceived as a threat to physical survival. For these reasons, psychological violence may promote the development of the syndrome as much or more than physical violence. This makes sense. A person who threatens to shoot you may be the one knocking on your door, calling you on the phone, turning into your driveway, or waiting around the next corner. Every moment is filled with fear until you are finally shot. Once shot, you can relax because you now know where and how the shooting occurred, how seriously you were hurt, what you need to do to take care of the wound, etc. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

Lionel was filled with awful remorse. He asked where had Thomas been last seen, and the boy told him he was headed for the church. Lionel nodded and went home to fetch his shotgun. Throughout the crisis he had done no violence, preferring to preach the sanity of pacifism to the flock. This was different. This was a requirement of the father to the son. He prayed over the shotgun while Darla wailed with the children in the living room. He got in his truck and drove to the church. -- From "The South Fork Penance ~ L. Joseph Shosty

So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year - meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11's casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 and 2012 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the "war on terror.") ~ Rebecca Solnit

There is much room to grow as individuals, and in doing so we can discover truths about our own inclinations. You should know that for every action there is a reaction. Your perseverance, kindness, or humor creates a ripple effect in our culture just as much as your indifference, violence, or negativity ~ Omar Saif Ghobash

It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas. ~ Edward Bond

Even bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful. ~ E.F. Schumacher

I would like to see us grow in developing a deep understanding of the need for healing as an abolitionist practice. Many of us come to this work with our own wounds--whether from childhood trauma, racism, homophobia, or the violence of police and prisons. In fact, many of us draw energy and inspiration from these wounds and the anger they create. But we are also drained by these traumas. Or find ourselves neglecting our bodies and spirits in the same ways that we may have been neglected in the past. As a result, our movement can be very 'head' oriented--talking, planning, thinking, writing--and not body and emotion oriented. This work doesn't have to be individualistic or separate from movement work; we can include it all in our movement spaces and make it a collective activity, just like the community recovery movement. But a movement against a violent and violating phenomenon like the PIC cannot hope to be successful if we don't directly address and heal the effects of that violence. ~ Julia Sudbury

He who trifles with truth cuts at the root of Ahimsa [non-violence]. He who is angry is guilty of Himsa. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

It was an impulsive decision, but then anything worth doing usually was. When you think about it, anything passionate - lust, love, violence, hatred - is spontaneous. ~ L.J. Shen

I don't like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game,but it isn't exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport. ~ Bowie Kuhn

She thought of the ways in which humans could be filled with both terrible evil and such enduring love. Unspeakable violence and astonishing gentleness. Blame and grace. … Who is to blame? That was the question. And Josie's heart had found peace in the answer. Put simply: All of us. All of us are to blame. For fighting to move on rather than lashing out, for choosing to stand up over and over again after we collapse, for working to heal the broken parts of ourselves so the shards don't wound the world. ~ Mia Sheridan

I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did. ~ Eve Ensler

Spring irises bloom.
The caged bird no longer sings -
the knee on his throat. ~ Kamand Kojouri

I can think of films that I'm producing right now that are extremely hard-hitting, graphic films, that nobody necessarily wants to see, graphic in terms of violence, of adult content and racial and historical subject matter. ~ Aaron Eckhart

Confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one man. It is easy to name the disappearances of the Dirty War as crimes, ~ Rebecca Solnit