6 Wendell Berry Quotes on Violence

Wendell Berry quotes on violence

4. If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer-and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last. In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood.

29. To imply by the word 'terrorism' that this sort of terror is the work exclusively of 'terrorists' is misleading. The 'legitimate' warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.The distinction between the intention to perpetrate violence against innocents, as in 'terrorism,' and the willingness to do so, as in 'war,' is not a source of comfort.

40. Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great-and successful-advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices.

41. We cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore 'domestic violence' and think that our society can be pacified by 'gun control.' Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.

42. Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in 'justice' or in affirmation of 'rights' or in defense of 'peace' do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.

46. We are disposed, somewhat by culture and somewhat by nature, to solve our problems by violence, and even to enjoy doing so. And yet by now all of us must at least have suspected that our right to live, to be free, and to be at peace is not guaranteed by any act of violence. It can be guaranteed only by our willingness that all other persons should live, be free, and be at peace-and by our willingness to use or give our own lives to make that possible.