Symbolic Violence Quotes

Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, which is 'violence that is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity'...provides an explanation of how social inequalities can continue largely unabated. Within this perspective, individual subjects are subjected to various forms of violence, such as being treated unfairly or denied resources, or are limited in their social mobility and aspirations, but they do not tend to see it that way; rather it is misrecognised by individual subjects as the natural order of things. Gender domination in the patriarchal family is an example of symbolic violence in operation. Through habitus formation in this context, women were often confined emotionally, socially, economically and physically and the perception that women were inferior to men in the home and more generally in society was perpetuated. Women's misrecognition of this violence as 'natural' and 'normal' gendered relations in the world led to their being complicit in reinscribing through their daily practices, their own domination. ~ Kerry H Robinson

Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle … The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation. ~ Ngugi Wa Thiongo

An idea is an idea. It can be right or wrong. Let me say what I think. Don't seal my lips with your symbolic violence. ~ Tarif Naaz

I was not frightened as they were, for the very violence of his threats showed how weak he was. ~ Erik Christian Haugaard

Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance. ~ Gary Steiner

Of course ours was a very small circle among a multitude of circles, a few of them concentric, but mostly not, but it would not be too much to say that for ours David Cecil held a torch - not for war heroes, or anti-war heroes, but for people who led quiet lives, studious and sociable, into which the idea of violence never entered ~ L.P. Hartley

Mentally, I am in prison. The only thing I am allowed to do is think...think...think...of the 'what if's' and the consequences I have to endure."
~Love is respect ♥~ ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars ... ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Violence is itself a form of political mobilisation. It is mainly directed against civilians and not at another army. The aim is to capture territory through political control rather than through military success. And political control is maintained through terror, through expulsion or elimination of those who challenge political control, especially those with a different label. Population displacement, massacres, widespread atrocities are not just side effects of war; they are a deliberate strategy for political control. The tactic is to sow the fear and hate on which exclusive identity claims rest. ~ Leon Kukkuk

The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart
it is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that benefits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice
it does not so much nibble at our shoe leather as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from the bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our small-minded questions, but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask. ~ Rich Mullins

REJECT THE LIES AND VIOLENCE. STAND FOR LOVE, TRUTH, DECENCY AND THE COMMON GOOD. ~ Bryant McGill

Mr. President, prime ministers, let us have ambitions: ambitions to move beyond the violence and occupation, to the day when two states, Palestine and Israel, can live together side by side in peace and security. ~ Abdallah II Of Jordan

When we judge others we contribute to violence. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

It is not uncommon for fighters' camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one's life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing. ~ Norman Mailer

This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul. ~ Robert Kennedy

Both physical and social pain seem less painful when we're cushioned by symbolic reminders of money, even when the money isn't real or doesn't belong to us. ~ Adam Alter

The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief....In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.

p. 11 ~ Peter Maass

You cannot live a nonviolent life as long as you are consuming violence. Please consider going vegan. ~ Gary L. Francione

GUNS ARE NOT THE ISSUE. WE ARE. ~ Aaron B. Powell

In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate. p. 21 ~ Thomas Merton

He was The Demon Highlander, elder brother to the Blackheart of Ben More. These monikers, they were not granted by the happenstance of birth or marriage, like a Marquess or an Earl, they were earned by means of ruthless violence and bloodshed. It was easy to forget that fact beneath the grand chandelier of this lofty keep. That was, until the fire in the hearth ignited the amber in his eyes, lending him a ferocity that even his expensive attire couldn't tame. ~ Kerrigan Byrne

I don't make any notes, but I do know where to find things. Suppose I need to know where Wexford first talked about his love of the countryside or where he quotes Larkin or what was the beginning of his hatred of racism or where he first encountered domestic violence; I would be able to find it straight away. ~ Ruth Rendell

I do not know what put the idea of China into his head, but at first he must have thrust it aside with violent repulsion; and perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed the idea on him, for he found it haunting him. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.' ~ Anna Julia Cooper

In the past days, she'd come to understand the importance of upheaval. The tallest mountains were created by violence and chaos; like them, a woman's independence was born of fire. ~ Kristin Hannah

We will never be the same after a narc. We will be stronger, smarter, careful, boundary bad ass loving people. That will never stand for less than we deserve again. ~ Tracy Malone

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

There is more in front: a timid, desperate cub
Locked in a fickle case, wounded and incoherent.
We are all that youngling, together in this cosmic hub,
And we are not alone in the universe, we are it.
But beware the pavement makes us only see the peachy -
We care about the diapered: the children and the old,
And anyone in between is just an asshole species.
The challenge is to see the little child through their cold
For we don't grow at the same pace as our body. ~ Karl Kristian Flores

The 'realist' conception of continuing old-fashioned 'balance of power' politics may have been well founded in the past, but it is inconsistent with our increasing interdependent world. On moral grounds alone there can be no justification for the 20th century level of killing. To settle disputes without violence must become the primary goal of foreign policy for every nation. ~ Robert McNamara

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate ~ Alan Brien

If we divide human attributes into "masculine" and "feminine" and strengthen only those attributes that "belong" to that sex, we cut off half of ourselves from ourselves as human beings, condemned forever to search for our other half. The world is in desperate need of multilayered human beings with the voices, stamina, and insight to break through our current calcified ways of doing things, (...) The patriarchal structures of honor, shame, violence, and might is right, do as much harm to Hamlet, Edgar, Lear, and Coriolanus as they do to Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macduff (...)
(...) To have feelings, intuitive flights of understanding, a desire to have knowledge of what is happening below the surface, to serve. These are often called "feminine" attributes, and it is true that many women in the plays possess them. But they also belong to Kent, Ferdinand, Florizel, Camillo, as well as the women. So they are not "feminine" attributes: they are human attributes. ~ Tina Packer

Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that's not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives? ~ Christopher Fowler

The sooner being gay is completely normalized, the sooner homophobic prohibitions against touch will be taken off straight men. As much as gay men have faced the brunt of homophobic violence, straight men have been banished to a desert of physical isolation by these same homophobic fanatics who police lesbians and gays in our society. The result has been a generation of American men who do not hug each other, do not hold hands and cannot sit close together without the homophobic litmus test kicking in. ~ Mark Greene

H.I.V.E. will not tolerate unauthorized violence between students, especially students that have only been here for a matter of hours."
"I was just introducing myself," Otto replied innocently. "I'm afraid I appear to have inadvertently offended them somehow. ~ Mark Walden

The unnatural ways we substitute for the natural prove not enough and soon there must be more and more unnaturalness, more and more violence. ~ Lucy Freeman

When violence occurs anywhere, it is everybody's problem, ~ Patricia Cornwell

We don't have a gun problem; we have a math problem: ZERO GUNS = ZERO GUN-RELATED DEATHS. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

You can't answer violence with counter violence ... The answer is love. The best sabotage is love. ~ Athol Fugard

One does not have to hit you to abuse you. They can degrade, humiliate, blame, curse, manipulate and try to control you. It still is violence. ~ Nitya Prakash

3. War Peace & Action -
3B.02 LOVE & PEACE
Hatred goes not by hatred,
Violence not by violence,
Disappear hatred and violence,
By love, understanding, non-violence.
[241] - 3B ~ Munindra Misra

What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows. ~ George Orwell

It's not enough for women to speak out on the issue - for the message to be strong and consistent, women's voices must be backed up by men's. ~ John Conyers

Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I have been broken down many times before - and I am always the one who is left to pick up the pieces. Most of the time, there are too many pieces to pick up, so I leave them where they lay and never look back. I have to be honest with myself, that is one of my mistakes, instead of walking away, I should have picked up the pieces. That way, I would have learned and grown from what was left behind."
~Love is respect ♥~ ~ Charlena E. Jackson

That it is fairly improbable to get much emotional response out of this man, I am convinced. There is a long-conditioned hardness, an outer shell which has been worn and used so long, probably nothing exists beneath it. Having dealt with force, violence, and easy dispositions of the lives of others, it is questionable as to how much value he puts on life in general, including his own in particular. This was not discussed with him, though it would be interesting to get some information on that point. Getting a sincere or emotionally meaningful answer from him is like trying to bail water from a long-dry well. ~ Leon Goldensohn

Violence is man re-creating himself. ~ Frantz Fanon

All of the systems that present different worlds, planes of being and energy centers ultimately fail if you try to make them all-inclusive. They are symbolic representations of something that lies beyond the world of thought and analysis. ~ Frederick Lenz

The weapon is poison,' Kit said. 'I believe that the cause we carry it in is just, but that will not protect you. It is not only death to those whose skin it cuts; it holds a deeper violence within it. If you carry it-just that, carry it and nothing more-the poison will still affect you. In time, you will grow ill from it, and eventually, inevitably, it will kill you.'
'It's a sword, Kit,' Marcus said, lifting the green scabbard from it's place. They're all like that. ~ Daniel Abraham

Violence is the most popular political commodity. Politicians are the wholesalers of violence. Ruling elites are the main beneficiary of violence and working classes are the innocent and silent victims of violence. When politician and corporate forces comes together to promote the gross violence they call that War, uprisings etc. ~ William Gomes

Violence without violation is only a noise heard by no one, the most horrendous sound in the universe. ~ Thomas Ligotti

No ONE MENTIONS YOUR TEARS, SADNESS OR SLOW DEATH! BUT, WE FEEL YOUR FALLEN TEARS, YOUR BEHEADED BODIES, YOUR RAPED DIGNITY! ~ Widad Akreyi