Quotes / A Real Man Is a Killer

Fan Works

Here was someone who hunted men and monsters, but unlike the so-called "warriors" who bragged of their exploits and counted their kills this Hunter was someone who did not relish it at all. To Kyril, the act of killing was a chore, not a sacred calling or a way to prove one's manhood.
Just a chore, and like any other burdensome chore it was meant to be endured.

— The Night Unfurls: Re-Imagined, defying this trope

Film — Animated

James: They're an interesting species, sir. They're peaceful and they're intelligent. Their lives are filled with art and music.
Hemmer: I meant, can they fight? They're not going to hit us with paintings, are they?
James: I believe they can fight, sir.
Hemmer: Good. Then they'll die with honor.

— Battle for Terra

"Go ahead, shoot me. Be a man!"

—Clayton, Tarzan

"And you! Learn to use that properly. A man's not a man unless he knows how to shoot!

— John Ratcliffe, Pocahontas

Film — Live-Action

"Never apologize, mister. It’s a sign of weakness."

— Captain Nathan Brittles, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

"We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember, I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized. Like I was shot. Like I was shot with a diamond. A diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, 'My God! The genius of that! The genius! The will to do that!' Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we."

—Col. Walter E. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

"You must taste blood to be a man!"

—The Cult Leader, Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except

Live-Action TV

I want to see you become like me. Hail the Doctor, the great exterminator!

— Doctor Who, "The Parting of the Ways"

"Ah, now he's decided he enjoys violence and he's ready to kill like a man oughta."

— Tom Servo on The Girl in Gold Boots

Music

Every man gonna be a soldier
Every man be cut to kill
Every man looking over his shoulder
Every man be shaking still

— Fred Small, "Every Man"

Web Original

Saward is well-known as something of a Darwinist, in the sense that he is drawn to characters with a kill-or-be-killed, survival-of-the-fittest mentality. The fifth Doctor was, however, explicitly characterised as a liberal, a philosophy which Saward had difficulty in coming to grips with: frequently, Sawards' scripts have the Doctor dithering and then engaging in a violent act, strongly suggesting Saward's conflict between his desire to write a story featuring a Darwinist action-hero and his knowledge that the character should be portrayed as anything but... The Doctor at no point counters this argument; he could say that it is people like Davros who perpetuate the cycle of death and destruction, but instead, he simply freezes.

—Alan Stevens on Doctor Who, "Resurrection of the Daleks"

Men get to slice each other up while radiating honour and nobility; women get to luxuriate and self-subjugate in a version of femininity steeped in both virtue and beauteous uselessness... The pre-modern or early-modern is repurposed as a sequined and/or sword-wielding exemplar for the anti-modern. And the great thing is that you can enjoy your anti-modernity immaculately packaged for you by the modern publishing industry, and the modern TV industry, and the modern film industry. You can yearn for the certainties of the medieval via DVD. Capitalism is happy to commodify your pre-capitalist yearnings.

—Jack Graham, "Bring Back the Stocks!"

Real Life

Rationality is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species...even more in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.

—Bertrand Russell

Moderation in the eyes of the Asiatics is a sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am inexorably severe.

—General Aleksey Yermolov (1816)

For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence.

—Benito Mussolini

"Hitler had the willpower of a demon and he needed it. If he didn't have such a strong willpower he couldn't have achieved anything. Don't forget, if Hitler had not lost the war, if he did not have to fight against the combination of big powers like England, America, and Russia — each one he could have conquered individually — these defendants and these generals would now be saying, 'Heil Hitler,' and would not be so damn critical."

—Hermann Göring at Nuremberg

There is something strangely infantile in this obsession with dice-loaded physical courage when the only courage that matters in political or even real life is moral.

—Gore Vidal

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

—Robert A. Heinlein

Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so.

—Donald Trump, Bring Back the Death Penalty!

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence.

— Christopher Hitchens

So the question is this: when are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night? ...We have feminized the Medal of Honor.

—Bryan Fischer, anti-homosexual activist

The internal qualities once said to embody manhood — surefootedness, inner strength, confidence of purpose — are merchandised back to men to enhance their manliness. The more productive aspects of manhood, such as building or cultivating or contributing to a society, couldn't establish a foothold on the shiny flat surface of a commercial culture, a looking-glass before which men could only act out a crude semblance of masculinity.

—Katherine Viner, Stiffed

For Mr. Breivik, cultural Marxism's central crime was to have de-masculinised European identity.

—Praveen Swami on spree killer Anders Breivik

"I'll admit it. I will eat my neighbors, I'm not letting my kids die. I'm just going to be honest. My superpower is being honest. I've extrapolated this out and I won't have to for a few years 'cause I got food and stuff, but I'm literally looking at my neighbors now and going: I'm ready to hang them up and gut them and skin them and chop them up, you know what? I'm ready. My daughters aren't starving to death, I'll eat the neighbors. See, my super power is being honest, I'll eat your ass. I will!"

—Alex Jones

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

—Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

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