Dave Grossman > 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

“There is no shame in failure. For a warrior the only shame is in not trying.)”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“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

“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 bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it. —Thucydides”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“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

“Napoleon said, “The moment of greatest vulnerability is the instant immediately after victory.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“Despite our wonders and greatness, we are a society that has experienced so much social regression, so much decadence, in so short a period of time, that in many parts of America we have become the kind of place to which civilized countries used to send missionaries. - quoting William Bennett”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Ted Turner said: “Television violence is the single most significant factor contributing to violence in America.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“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

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

“Pain shared is pain divided, and you are only as sick as your secrets. In a debriefing, you have the opportunity to share those secrets and to share your pain as you come together to help each other through a traumatic event. Those who say that they do not”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“when soldiers were left to their own devices, the vast majority of them, on all sides, could not kill.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“You will likely hear participants say such things as, “So that’s what you did?” “Oh, I forgot about that.” “So, when you did that, that’s when I did this. Now it makes sense.” Like a jigsaw puzzle that had been scattered with pieces missing, it all begins to come together as everyone adds their one or two pieces.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“The sense of personal effectiveness and self confidence created by realistic training is as much a stress reducer as when the muscles go on autopilot.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“the rate at which we are trying to kill or seriously injure each other, might be at the highest levels in peacetime history.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“if a student ever states that he is dead, the right answer is, “No, you aren’t dead! I don’t give you permission to die. I don’t train people to die. I train them to live!”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

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

“The murder rate is being held down by medical technology,”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“Per capita aggravated assaults in the U.S. increased almost sevenfold between 1957 and 1993.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“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

“those who experienced the “Thank God it wasn’t me” response. Having this thought race through your mind upon seeing violent death is arguably one of the deepest, darkest, most shameful of all human responses. However, when you tell people that it is a normal thought, it is as if a huge weight has been lifted, and their sense of shame no longer has power to hurt them.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace

“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

“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

“If there was a leader present ordering soldiers to fire, then almost everyone would do so.”
― Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace