Masculinity and Violence Quotes in Macbeth

For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name), / Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel, / Which smok’d with bloody execution, / Like Valour’s minion, carv’d out his passage, / Till he fac’d the slave; / Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, / Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chops, / And fix’d his head upon our battlements.

Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty!

Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way.

But screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And we’ll not fail.

I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums / And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this.

He has no children.—All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?—O hell-kite!—All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

As cannons overcharg’d with double cracks; / So they / Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe: / Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds, / Or memorize another Golgotha, / I cannot tell—

Now o’er the one half-world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtain’d sleep. Witchcraft celebrates / Pale Hecate’s off’rings; and wither’d murder, / Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, / Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, / With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design / Moves like a ghost.—

The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures. ’Tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil.