One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
-Jimi Hendrix
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
- Mohandas K. Gandhi
The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.
- Abraham Lincoln
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us,
and the world will be as one.
- John Lennon
All we are saying is: give peace a chance.
-John Lennon
One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history.
- Peace Pilgrim
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein
Nothing is more precious than peace...Peace is the most basic starting point for the advancement of humankind.
- Daisaku Ikeda
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
- Mother Teresa
Peace is the only battle worth waging.
- Albert Camus
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
-Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.
-Wilkie (William) Collins
Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.
-Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.
-Joan Baez
No tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves.
-Ojibway Tribe
One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better
-Daniel Berrigan
Peace may sound simple - one beautiful word - but it requires everything we have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.
- Yehudi Menuhin
The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.
- Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
- Mahatma Gandhi |
We shall never be able to effect physical disarmament until we have succeeded in effecting moral disarmament.
- J. Ramsay MacDonald
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics,which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings , we are still savages.
- Thomas A. Edison
I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
- Albert Einstein
Peace is more precious than a piece of land.
-Anwar Sadat
If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament - disarmament follows peace.
- Bernard Baruch
And yet, when I look up to the sky,
I somehow feel that everything
will change for the better,
that this cruelty too shall end,
that peace and tranquility will return once more.
- Anne Frank
War
There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders
-Ralph Bunche
In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.
- Herodotus
The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.
- Henry Fosdick
Here then, is the problem we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?
-The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people ... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
-Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948),
I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey's Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do.
-Howard Zinn
Rob Helb served as an Army Air Corps gunner and lost an arm over the oil fields of Turkey. After crashing, he asked a crew member to retrieve his bloodied and severed arm so he could remove from its wrist the gold watch his father had given him.
-Christopher Ward
I was an infantry officer in the Army from 1969 to 1971. Men in my platoon who had served time in Vietnam told me many stories—but none more chilling than the one from two helicopter pilots. They told me how they would shoot the friendlies on their way back from reconnaissance missions just so they could empty their ammunition before returning to base. The friendlies were South Vietnamese women and children, helpless victims in a war they did not understand. But to the American pilots, they were simply dots on the ground.
-John Whitehead
The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier. In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you...because no one has the right to take the life of another human being .
- Joan Baez
Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind...War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
-John F. Kennedy
Our chiefs are killed...The little children are freezing to death. My people... have no blankets, no food...My heart is sick and sad...I will fight no more forever.
-Chief Joseph
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
-Noam Chomsky
In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them.
-Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk
Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.
-General Douglas MacArthur
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.
-Abraham Lincoln: Nov. 21, 1864 - (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
-Patrick J. Buchanan
War is a way of shattering to pieces...materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses... too intelligent.
-George Orwell
Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develope weapons of mass destruction.
-George W. Bush
Earth
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.
-Gandhi
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
-John Muir (1838-1914)
Action
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
- Martin Luther King Junior
We believe we can create public awareness of an issue by reaching one percent of the people. A metal is considered a magnet if one percent of it is polarized.
-Gwen Evans, Public Media Center
All the States but our own are sensible that knowledge is power.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph C. Cabell
We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war. There is no task that is more important or closer to my heart.
- Albert Einstein
All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.
- Albert Einstein
Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort which might have saved the world.
- Jane Addams
The future depends on what we do in the present. - Mahatma Gandhi
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
People need to realize that they need to take the initiative.
- Arun Gandhi
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787
Courage is of no value unless accompanied by justice; yet if all men became just, there would be no need for courage.
-Agesilaus the Second
The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men
- Plato
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
-Elie Wiesel
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
-Abraham Lincoln
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
-Patrick Henry
We the People are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts--not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
-Abraham Lincoln
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
-George Orwell
Liberty 
Four freedoms: The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of everyone to worship God in his own way, everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want...everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear...anywhere in the world.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
-Steve Biko
Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816
He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
-Thomas Jefferson, deleted portion of a draft of the Declaration of Independence, June, 1776
If a nation expects to be ignorant -and free- in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816
True, lasting peace cannot be secured through the strength of arms alone. Among free peoples, the open exchange of ideas ultimately is our greatest security.
- Ronald Reagan
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Archibald Stewart, Dec 23, 1791
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
-Abraham Lincoln
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
-James Madison
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
- Patrick Henry, American colonial revolutionary
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
-John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776 | |
