Tao Te Ching
Aggression
Freud called aggression “the most powerful obstacle to culture” and Buddhism describes it as one of the Three Poisons (triviṣa)—one of the three basic, innate character flaws that cause suffering in the world and in our personal lives. Not only in humans but for mammals, birds, insects, and even amoeba; the tendency to push away what we don’t like pervades behavioral motivation. The Taoist Farmer story epitomizes the potential benefits of a different approach which Lao Tzu describes in detail. This same appreciation dances through the teachings of most of our wise philosophers and takes a place at the heart of Nietzsche’s way of looking at life.
Quotes (79)
“Victory breeds hatred. The defeated live in pain. Happily the peaceful live giving up victory and defeat.”
“Like rain breaking through an ill-thatched house; ignorance, passion, and aggression will break through an unreflecting mind.”
“Defend and one has a surplus. Attack and one is insufficient…Taking whole is victory over aggression… It preserves the possibilities. Victory is ongoing, a way of being rather than a final goal.”
“The sage commander moves beyond defeat by being victorious over his own aggression... the general who is not victorious over his anger brings destruction to his own troops as well as the enemy. Aggression gives the enemy something against which to fight. this mires the general in battle. The sage commander responds to aggression by creating space”
“Beat, beat the crownless head,
Rend the cheek till the tears run red!
O thou whose wound was deepest,
Thou that my children keepest
Gather me where thou sleepest.”
“Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.”
“Educated men condemn murders and call them wrong but do not realize that a war of aggression against another country is wrong praising it and giving it their support… therefore it is clear they do not know the difference between right and wrong.”
“If you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me... the evil of unjustly taking away the life of another is far greater.”
“As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.”
“Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.”
“He who takes up the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that evil can be overcome by evil, or violence by violence?”
“If anyone wants to be first, that person will be the last of all and everyone’s servant.”
“Avenge not yourselves, for it is written, 'Vengence is mine, I will repay,' saith the Lord.”
“Return your sword to its place, for all who will take up the sword, will die by the sword.”
“Do not leave alive a single soul, completely destroy them—the Hittities, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you”
“Give tidings of painful doom to those who disbelieve... Slay the idolaters wherever you find them... and fight until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah.”
“We hate suffering, but love it’s causes.”
“Uniting with space, your consort's secret mandala,
Pure pleasure exciting your nerve centers,
Your aggression was assuaged and loving kindness was born.”
“How to act like a Buddha? With total abstention from action never letting passion, aggression, ignorance, or belief that things exist or don’t exist influence how you act.”
“First, eliminate the diseases of being chaotic and contrary, resolute and strong, brutal and overbearing, enraged, extravagant, profligate, boastful, ambitious, courageous, licentious, favored or favoring; then, grounded in noncontention, warfare will cease.”
“I am sick and tired of this life of endless passion, aggression, and ignorance”
“If we repay wrongs with kindness, we put an end to revenge. If we repay wrongs with wrongs, revenge never ends.”
“Even when passion and aggression arise, I have no anxiety. I have confidence in knowing them as self-liberated.”
“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation.”
“You think that good means hating what is bad. What's bad is the hating mind itself”
“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
“It is impossible to rise to freedom, from the midst of corruptions, without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease.”
“Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.”
“A day will come when a cannon will be a museum-piece, as instruments of torture are today. And we will be amazed to think that these things once existed!”
“Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.”
“To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together... the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class.”
“To bill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.”
“Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
“An innate, independent, instinctual disposition, aggression constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.”
“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love... the glories of war are all blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.”
“The laying down of the commandment to not kill and to not damage is one of the greatest events in the spiritual history of mankind.”
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
“that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed… and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriots – how passionately I hate them!... this bogey would have disappeared long ago had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests.”
“We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.”
“The Second World War—the tempest which had already begun to drive down upon the earth. Millions of people trembled as they saw the oncoming hunger, slaughter, and madness. All the devils in men were awake and thirsting for blood.”
“We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are only more newspapers; vast and powerful organizations scour the planet for crimes and scandals that will console their readers for stenography and monogamy.”
“cruelty is the memory—if only in the blood—of a time when the test of survival was the ability to kill... Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence.”
“Curse all these men who come into the world to upset it with wars! and curse them for spoiling our homes and fouling our women and making our life a thing of fear and emptiness! Curse such childish men that cannot have done with fights and quarrels in childhood... Curse all women who give birth to men who make war, and curse their grandmothers and all who are their kin!”
“the world now with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression... still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive and a society that supports this… How very important it is to bring about in the human mind a radical revolution.”
“Jealousy doesn't show how much you love someone, only how insecure you are.”
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current”
“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”
“The history of bombing—and no one has bombed more than this nation—is a history of endless atrocities, all calmly explained by deceptive and deadly language like 'accident', 'military target', and 'collateral damage'.”
“The Greatest Generation? They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War II. But I refuse to celebrate "the greatest generation" because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are mis-educating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War II prepares us—innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others—for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past.”
“Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”
“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”
“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.”
“The cause of someon's aggression is their suffering and your aggression is not going to help anything... by not yelling back you're just getting smart about what's really going to bring you some happiness.”
“When you begin to realize aggression as it is, there is a sudden flash of spaciousness, and the aggression is completely cleared out. It is like living is a stuffy room, and suddenly the window is wide open and fresh air is coming in.”
“Politics are often based on bad-mouthing and copying someone else's aggression. This only snowballs making things worse. A Buddhist approach would look at the chaos and problems that exist as delightful and something to confidently work on.”
“Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years worth of education.”
“Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs…
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.”
“You can’t try to change people without inflicting violence on them… Hitler and Stalin, in their own opinions, were acting for the benefit of humanity.”
“Pornography does not cause rape or violence, which predate pornography by thousands of years. Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls...”
“Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself… Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult think in the world to shake off.”
“An unmarried man 24-35 is about 3x as likely to murder another male as a married man of the same age… leaving lots of men without wives and children is not just inegalitarian; it’s dangerous…”
“What causes all the hatred?… human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real us’; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real them.’”
“We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”
“One who desires victory over others perpetuates a cycle of resistance and violence that only decrease one’s likelihood of survival.”
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