Structral violence Quotes

“In this becalmed zone the sea has a smooth surface, the palm-tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the pebbles and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler; and all the while the native, bent double, near dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging dream. The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey... Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fever, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.”

“In this becalmed zone the sea has a smooth surface, the palm-tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the pebbles and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler; and all the while the native, bent double, near dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging dream. The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey... Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fever, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.”

“We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood,the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work.”

“Violence only begets violence when we allow it to. We always have a choice.”

“we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.”

“To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”

“When we allow violence against some, we enable violence against all.”

“The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed. ”

“Each subject perceives and instigates the violence within the philosophy of nonviolence since injustice, hatred and such conduct hold the feeling of violence, even changing the system, first, passes the violence before it prevails. Despite that, violence also exists, in one's thoughts, without exception; however, the question is not the violence, but self-control that demonstrates the peace, which approaches the victory and supremacy.”

“The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.”

“Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.”