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1 " Ironically, the worship of of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death's power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives. "
2 " And now that we exercise so comprehensive a medical and technological mastery over whole regions or nature at whose mercy our ancestors lived out their lives, we enjoy the unprecedented luxury of being able to render the 'natural' at once remote and benign. It is we who summon it, rather than the reverse, and we do so at our pleasure; it dwells with us, not we with it. We are free to sentimentalize or romanticize it, or even weave a veil of empty and unthreatening sanctity around it - until the moment when disease, age, infirmity, or random violence suddenly defeats us, or fire, flood, tempest, volcanic eruption, or earthquake surprise us by vaulting past our defenses. Then nature astonishes and horrifies us with its power, immensity, and sublime indifference. Even at such times, though, it is unlikely that we truly hate it; ours is a disenchanted world because it is one from which our love, reverence, dread, and hatred have all been irrevocably alienated. Nature for us is a single, internally consistent thing, an event, lovely and enticing, then terrible and pitiless, abundant and destructive at once, but moved neither by will nor by intelligence; it is sheer fact. "
― David Bentley Hart , The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
3 " If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result. "
― Leonard Sax , Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men
4 " Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock? "
― Abbie Hoffman , Steal This Book