Violence Quotes

"Then what will it take to take it back?” “Blood.” Dancer smiles at me like a township alleycat. There’s a beast behind this man’s fatherly smiles. Eo was right. It comes to violence."

"Blood begets blood begets blood begets blood …"

"There are feuds that do not change, Darrow. Cats and dogs. Ice and fire. Augustus and Bellona. My family and the ArchGovernor’s."

"My husband just sat there and watched them die. In the end, the same thing took him. He was a good man. But good men die. To free them, to protect them, we must be savages. So give me evil. Give me darkness. Make me the bloodydamn devil if we can bring even the faintest ray of light."

"and with the sound of a frozen tree branch cracking in winter, I claim the sword arm of Cassius au Bellona."

"They were wrong. Your side isn’t made of stone."

"The heroes of Red songs have mercy, honor. They let men live, as I let the Jackal live, so they can remain untarnished by sin. Let the villain be the evil one. Let him wear black and try to stab me as I turn my back, so I can wheel about and kill him, giving satisfaction without guilt. But this is no song. This is war."

"Torture can be effective if done correctly with confirmable information in a narrow scope. Like any tool, it is not a panacea; it must be used properly. Personally, I don’t really think we have the luxury of drawing moral lines in the sand. Not today. Let Barca have a go. Pulls some nails. Some eyes if need be."

"I’ve heard the Rim is different. They do not kill children here. But everyone likes to pretend that they don’t kill children."

"Violence is a tool. It is meant to shock. To change. Instead, they normalize and celebrate it. And create a culture of exploitation where they are so entitled to sex and power that when they are told no, they pull a sword and do as they like."

"I’m dead. You said it yourself. I can try to deny it, but…my sister makes me look like the village cat. I shot her in the spine and played acid drip with her back for almost a year. She’s going to peel me like an onion."

"I once thought the greatest sin of war was violence. It isn’t. The greatest sin is it requires good men to become practical."

"He is an effective operator, to be certain. He presented me with a hideous desert rodent and said my pain would last only as long as the rat ate. It gnawed the flesh off my calves, nose, and cheeks before it split its stomach and died. It was effective. It horrified. It degraded."

"As violence reaches for him, Darrow does not flinch like a man; he reaches like a covetous river. He pulls violence to him, drinks it into his current, and leaps around the battlefield with a seemingly mindless capriciousness. Which, when inspected, illuminates the genius of his violence. He herds us together, making sure we are tight and compact so that our options constrict and his men’s expand."

"Here lie Martians all Thralls of the Slave King Who thought with wicked delight to take your planet’s treasure and break their Master’s might All ye who enter here: witness their work, and despair"

"Distance has sanitized war nearly as much as Stoneside’s fucking ramblings. It has made it easy…romantic. I have no interest in sanitization nor romance. I apply scientific methods to produce psychological trauma in our enemies in order to create psychological casualties. To end their willingness to fight and shorten this war. That is my purpose."

"All of a man’s affairs become diseased when he wishes to cure evils by evils. For order, I impaled soldiers. For liberty, you drowned cities. The victor writes history with the blood of the vanquished. I wonder, in the end, which of us will turn out the hero? Don’t you?"

"I spot the signs of his advance from the far side of the Triumphia. It is like the coming of a tiger through tall grass. First a rippling in the distance that seems like the wind. Then a tunneling force. An outward swaying of riders. The starting of horses. Men disappear from saddles. Sunbloods collapse sideways with horrible wounds. And then, like the tiger’s tail, the curved slingBlade rises above the stalks as he threshes all in his path. He kills with impossible aggression."

"Starvation is a slow boil. The pan is set. The burner is on."

"Alas, the frailty of words. Steel, be thou my tongue."