I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence - I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.

The most important element of a free society where individual rights are held in the highest esteem is the rejection of the initiation of violence.

Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. It's not something that any culture religion or tradition propagates.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental mind-shaping driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

First of all my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.

Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.

The power which establishes a state is violence the power which maintains it is violence the power which eventually overthrows it is violence.

Power and violence are opposites where the one rules absolutely the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

For as long as the power of America's diversity is diminished by acts of discrimination and violence against people just because they are black Hispanic Asian Jewish Muslim or gay we still must overcome.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

In the case of Iraq notwithstanding the violence there at the moment the very fact that a hideous regime - responsible for genocide for the use of chemical and biological weapons aggression against two neighbors - has been removed in itself is a positive development.

Gay culture is surviving and thriving. Some activists believe the recent rise in homophobic violence might be a gauge of the success of positive gay images.

It is better to be violent if there is violence in our hearts than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

Freedom is poetry taking liberties with words breaking the rules of normal speech violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

No Arab ruler will consider the peace process seriously so long as he is able to toy with the idea of achieving more by the way of violence.

Well I think by any expectation South Africa has come a tremendously long way. We've seen a society that many people thought couldn't withstand a peaceful transition to democracy without a great deal of violence in fact make that transition and do it in relative peace and security.

The myth of redemptive violence - Caesar peace and victory - is in people's bones so deeply we aren't even aware of it. You crush the opposition that's how we bring peace.

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses alternatives to violence.

Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?

The aggressive unprovoked acts of violence against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas are revealing. It is clear they don't want peace but rather seek the ultimate destruction of Israel.

Instead of a man of peace and love I have become a man of violence and revenge.

Mr. President prime ministers let us have ambitions: ambitions to move beyond the violence and occupation to the day when two states Palestine and Israel can live together side by side in peace and security.