Violence - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

It would be killing for the sake of killing. I know very well that's a privilege reserved for humanity, but I don't allow such murderous pastimes.

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

Only what is killed can be resurrected.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

No newsman in his right mind objects to a little violence, for that's what news is made of.

- Clifford D. Simak, ''Sunspot Purge'' (1940)

''Violence,'' came the retort, ''is the last refuge of the incompetent.''

- Isaac Asimov, ''Foundation'' (1942)

Humans were almost as fond of exterminating other life as they were of killing off their own kind.

- Lester del Rey, ''Over the Top'' (1949)

The practical men [. . .] recognized the validity of competition, love of battle, strength in the face of overwhelming odds. These, they felt, were admirable traits for a race, and insurance toward its perpetuity.Without them, the race would be bound to retrogress. The tendency toward violence, they found, was inextricably linked with ingenuity, flexibility, drive.

- Robert Sheckley, ''The Seventh Victim'' (1953)

Strange, he thought, how each killing was a new excitement. It was something you just didn't tire of, the way you did of French pastry or women or drinking or anything else. It was always new and different.

- Robert Sheckley, ''The Seventh Victim'' (1953)

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue - and thoroughly immoral - doctrine that ''violence never settles anything'' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959)

We also have knowledge of ourselves . . . of the ancient, destructive urges in us, that grow more deadly as our populations approach in size and complexity those of ancient Mars. Every war crisis, witch-hunt, race-riot, and purge . . . is a reminder and a warning.We are the Martians. If we cannot control the inheritance within us . . . this will be their second dead planet!

- Nigel Kneale, Quatermass and the Pit (TV miniseries, 1959)

He was a very dispirited Poet. He had never expected the world to act in a courteous, seemly, or even sensible manner, and the world had seldom done so; often he had taken heart in the consistency of its rudeness and stupidity. But never before had the world shot the Poet in the abdomen with a musket.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

When mass murder's been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there's no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

A person who commits a violence against another is obviously in need of medical care.

- Mack Reynolds, ''Gun for Hire'' (1960)

There is another kind of violence that is much more deadly, much more defeating. It is the violence of indifference, the violence of being a caste apart from the rest of the world, the violence of being ignored, the violence of sitting alone, living on a pension, searching through the tattered, yellowed pages of old books for the lingering warmth of human understanding the writer may have been able to impart to his words.

- Dean Koontz, ''A Mouse in theWalls of the Global Village'' (1972)

Even the vagal flushes that seized at my chest seemed extensions of that real world of violence calmed and tamed within our television programmes and the pages of news magazines.

- J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

Our fear of violence may have been as destructive as the violence itself.

- Hilary Bailey, ''The Ramparts'' (1974)

They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit's strength lies in holding fast to the truth.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Eye of the Heron'' (1978)

Violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing - only sometimes nothing is what people want. Death is what they want. And they get it.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Eye of the Heron'' (1978)

The slaughter he had just witnessed struck him as abysmally repetitive of a great deal of recent history, and he did not wish to belong to that history anymore.

- Michael Bishop, ''The Quickening'' (1981)

Plenty of people didn't care for him much, but there is a huge difference between disliking somebody - maybe even disliking them a lot - and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.

- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

This is what I've seen in the four weeks since infection: people killing people - which is much what I saw in the four weeks before infection and the four weeks before that and before that - as far back as I care to remember, people killing people - which to my mind puts us in a state of normality right now.

- Alex Garland, 28 Days Later (film, 2002)