Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights Leader
"The SILENCE of the good people is more DANGEROUS than the BRUTALITY of the bad people"
Brutality quotes
Brutality
96 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Seamus Heaney
Poet, Playwright
"But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based."
Malcolm X
Civil Rights Activist, Minister
"I believe it's a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights Leader
"Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers."
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosopher, Writer
"All that the world most needs today, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art, — the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy)."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside brutality — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Brutality quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"What's worse than brutality that dehumanizes women? Tolerance and indifference towards it."
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"To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life."
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"Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions"
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"From Russia I didn't bring out a single happy memory, only sad, tragic ones. The nightmare of pogroms, the brutality of Cossacks charging young Socialists, fear, shrieks of terror."
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"Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality."
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"The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality."
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"The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced."
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"I see myself capable of arrogance and brutality... That's a fierce thing, to discover within yourself that which you despise the most in others."
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"I have pushed virtue to outright brutality."
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"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."
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"[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis."
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"This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen."
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"In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave."
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"the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead"
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"For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship."
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"In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism."
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"Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot."
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"The African tribesman, with his complete contempt for truth and his emphasis on brutality and savagery for others but not for himself, is a no-civilization."
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"Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality-thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard."
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"There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery."
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