9 Albert Camus Quotes on Violence

Albert Camus quotes on violence

105. All executioners are of the same family.

110. Barbarism is never temporary. Sufficient allowance is never made for it, and, quite naturally, from art barbarism extends to morals.

134. From the humanitarian idylls of the eighteenth century to the bloodstained gallows the way leads directly; and the executioners of today, as everyone knows, are humanists.

147. I loathe none but executioners.

163. It is not much to be able to do violence when you have been simply preparing for it for years and when violence is more natural to you than thinking. It is a great deal, on the other hand, to face torture and death when you know for a fact that hatred and violence are empty things in themselves. It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.

184. Our most effective terrorists, whether they are armed with bombs or with poetry, hardly escape from infancy.

203. The majority of revolutions are shaped by, and derive their originality from, murder.

211. The punishment that aims to intimidate an unknown murderer certainly confers a vocation of killer on many another monster about whom there is no doubt.

214. The triumph of the man who kills or tortures is marred by only one shadow: he is unable to feel that he is innocent. Thus, he must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success. When the concept of innocence disappears from the mind of the innocent victim himself, the value of power establishes a definitive rule over a world in despair.