A Quote by Edward Said

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

Edward Said

Quote Topics

Abstract Cause God Idea Justify Mass Slaughter

Quote Author

Edward Said
Palestinian - Writer
November 1, 1935 - September 25, 2003

One has to kill a few of one’s natural selves to let the rest grow — a very painful slaughter of innocents.

Henry Sidgwick

Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destory; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification.

Farley Mowat

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

Frans de Waal

The Peloponnesian War turns out to be no dry chronicle of abstract cause and effect. No, it is above all an intense, riveting, and timeless story of strong and weak men, of heroes and scoundrels and innocents too, all caught in the fateful circumstances of rebellion, plague, and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are.

Thucydides

Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument... The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

Bertrand Russell

To you a pious young girl who goes to mass and communion, seems pretty silly and childish; you take us for innocents... Well, let me tell you, sometimes we know more about evil than people who have only learned to offend God.

Georges Bernanos

Stem-cell research on embryos is an even worse excuse for the slaughter of life than abortion. No woman is even being spared an inconvenience this time.... It's just harvest and slaughter, harvest and slaughter, harvest and slaughter.

Ann Coulter

My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.

Barack Obama

According to a Pew poll, 49% of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism. What is socialism? it is a system that leads to mass misery, mass impoverishment, and human slaughter. That's what it means. Yet almost half of the young think it's benign.

David Horowitz

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.

Alvin Toffler

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.

Karl Marx

As in any war, there have been dreadful mistakes and civilian casualties. The difference is when Israelis kill innocents they apologize; when Hezbollah kills innocents they celebrate.

J. D. Hayworth

Our problem with limited resources is not primarily overpopulation; it is greed. Our problem with pollution is not the invention of fluorocarbons or mass transport; it is irresponsibility. The loss of an acre of forest every second, the mass slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the extinction of entire species of plants, insects and animals all over the world is not something that "just happens" because there are more of us human beings. It happens because the race of ruling beings put in charge has almost wholly lost its sense of stewardship. We have turned away from God.

Winkie Pratney

I think humans have always wrestled with the Divine Idea - an idea that unites and separates, creates and destroys, consoles and terrifies. Throughout human history, it is an idea that seems sometimes to have caused whole populations to rise up and slaughter one another.