On Killing Quotes

“Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the “dark beauty of violence,” and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“A tremendous volume of research indicates that the primary factor that motivates a soldier to do the things that no sane man wants to do in combat (that is, killing and dying) is not the force of self-preservation but a powerful sense of accountability to his comrades on the battlefield.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“The thing to understand here is that gang rapes and gang or cult killings in times of peace and war are not “senseless violence.” They are instead powerful acts of group bonding and criminal enabling that, quite often, have a hidden purpose of promoting the wealth, power, or vanity of a specific leader or cause…at the expense of the innocent.”
― Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing

“There can be no doubt that this resistance to killing one’s fellow man is there and that it exists as a result of a powerful combination of instinctive, rational, environmental, hereditary, cultural, and social factors. It is there, it is strong, and it gives us cause to believe that there just may be hope for mankind after all.”
― Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing

“The Israelis have consistently refused to put women in combat since their experiences in 1948. I have been told by several Israeli officers that this is because in 1948 they experienced recurring incidences of uncontrolled violence among male Israeli soldiers who had had their female combatants killed or injured in combat, and because the Arabs were extremely reluctant to surrender to women.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

“Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Napoleon stated that the moment of greatest danger was the instant immediately after victory, and in saying so he demonstrated a remarkable understanding of how soldiers become physiologically and psychologically incapacitated by the parasympathetic backlash that occurs as soon as the momentum of the attack has halted and the soldier briefly believes himself to be safe. During this period of vulnerability a counterattack by fresh troops can have an effect completely out of proportion to the number of troops attacking.”
― Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing

“There is strong evidence that there exists a genetic predisposition for aggression. In all species the best hunter, the best fighter, the most aggressive male, survives to pass his biological predispositions on to his descendants. There are also environmental processes that can fully develop this predisposition toward aggression; when we combine this genetic predisposition with environmental development we get a killer.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Robert Heinlein once wrote that fulfillment in life involved “loving a good woman and killing a bad man.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“The basic response stages to killing in combat are concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“The basic aim of a nation at war is establishing an image of the enemy in order to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from the act of murder. —Glenn Gray The Warriors”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“As a counselor I have been taught, and I hold it to be a fundamental truth of human nature, that when someone withholds something traumatic it can cause great damage. When”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Carl von Clausewitz warned that “it is to no purpose, it is even against one’s better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“seeing the elephant.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Peter Marin condemns the “inadequacy” of our psychological terminology in describing the magnitude and reality of the “pain of human conscience.” As a society, he says, we seem unable to deal with moral pain or guilt.”
― Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing

“On the other hand, if you disarm, tie up, and leave a POW out in a clearing somewhere because you can’t take him with you, then the word will spread that Americans treat POWs honorably, even when the chips are down, and a whole bunch of scared, tired soldiers will surrender rather than die. In World War II an entire Soviet army corps defected to the Germans. The Germans were treating Soviet POWs like dogs, and yet a whole corps came over to their side. How would they behave if they faced a humane enemy? “The last thing you ought to know is that if I ever catch any of you heroes killing a POW, I’ll shoot you right on the spot. Because it’s illegal, because it’s wrong, because it’s dumb, and it’s one of the worst things you could do to help us win a war.” I didn’t bother to include the possibility of organizing Soviet POWs and defectors into combat units and the very real importance of capturing POWs for intelligence purposes.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

“In A History of Militarism, Alfred Vagts accuses military history, as an institution, of having played a large part in the process of militarizing minds. Vagts complains that military history is consistently written “with polemic purpose for the justification of individuals or armies and with small regard for socially relevant facts.” He states, “A very large part of military history is written, if not for the express purpose of supporting an army’s authority, at least with the intention of not hurting it, not revealing its secrets, avoiding the betrayal of weakness, vacillation, or distemper.” Vagts paints an image of military and historical institutions that for thousands of years have reinforced and supported each other in a process of mutual glorification and aggrandizement. To a certain extent, this is probably because those who are good at killing in war are quite often those who throughout history have hacked their way to power.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Ernst Junger agreed that the defender had no moral right to surrender in these circumstances: “the defending force, after driving their bullets into the attacking one at five paces’ distance, must take the consequences. A man cannot change his feelings again during the last rush with a veil of blood before his eyes. He does not want to take prisoners but to kill.” During”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Disintegration of a combat unit…usually occurs at the 50% casualty point, and is marked by increasing numbers of individuals refusing to kill in combat…. Motivation and will to kill the enemy has evaporated along with their peers and comrades. —Peter Watson War on the Mind”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“I was utterly terrified—petrified—but I knew there had to be a Japanese sniper in a small fishing shack near the shore. He was firing in the other direction at Marines in another battalion, but I knew as soon as he picked off the people there—there was a window on our side—that he would start picking us off. And there was nobody else to go…and so I ran towards the shack and broke in and found myself in an empty room. There was a door which meant there was another room and the sniper was in that—and I just broke that down. I was just absolutely gripped by the fear that this man would expect me and would shoot me. But as it turned out he was in a sniper harness and he couldn’t turn around fast enough. He was entangled in the harness so I shot him with a .45 and I felt remorse and shame. I can remember whispering foolishly, “I’m sorry” and then just throwing up…I threw up all over myself. It was a betrayal of what I’d been taught since a child.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Like the blind men of the proverb, each individual feels a piece of the elephant, and the enormity of what he has found is overwhelming enough to convince each blindly groping observer that he has found the essence of the beast. But the whole beast is far more enormous and vastly more terrifying than society as a whole is prepared to believe.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Well over 1,000 studies point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting. Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“After an attack with weapons of mass destruction by a terrorist group or a terrorist nation, the next major threat to our existence is the violent decay of our civilization due to violence-enabling in the electronic media.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Thus, some individuals may skip certain stages, or blend them, or pass through them so fleetingly that they do not even acknowledge their presence.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“General James Gavin, the commander of the 82d Airborne Division in World War II, carried an M1 Garand rifle, then the standard American-infantry weapon of World War II. He advised young infantry officers not to carry any equipment that would make them stand out in the eyes of the enemy.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Increasing the distance between the [combatants]—whether by emphasizing their differences or by increasing the chain of responsibility between the aggressor and his victim allows for an increase in the degree of aggression. —Ben Shalit The Psychology of Conflict and Combat”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“Units with a history and tradition of close-combat, hand-to-hand killing inspire special dread and fear in an enemy by capitalizing upon this natural aversion to the “hate” manifested in this determination to engage in close-range interpersonal aggression. The British Gurkha battalions have been historically effective at this (as can be seen in the Argentinean’s dread of them during the Falklands War), but any unit that puts a measure of faith in the bayonet has grasped a little of the natural dread with which an enemy responds to the possibility of facing an opponent who is determined to come within “skewering range.” What these units (or at least their leaders) must understand is that actual skewering almost never happens; but the powerful human revulsion to the threat of such activity, when a soldier is confronted with superior posturing represented by a willingness or at least a reputation for participation in close-range killing, has a devastating effect upon the enemy’s morale.”
― Dave Grossman, On Killing

“The point here is that there is as much disinformation and as little insight concerning the nature of killing coming from the media as from any other aspect of our society.”
― Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing

“The media in our modern information society have done much to perpetuate the myth of easy killing and have thereby become part of society’s unspoken conspiracy of deception that glorifies killing and war. There are exceptions—such as Gene Hackman’s Bat 21, in which an air force pilot has to kill people on the ground, up close and personal for a change and is horrified at what he has done—but for the most part we are given James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Rambo, and Indiana Jones blithely and remorselessly killing men by the hundreds.”
― Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing