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Three quotes of unknown origin:
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.
An optimist says, 'War is impossible.' A pessimist says, 'War is inevitable.' A realist says, 'War is inevitable unless we make it impossible.'
There is no honourable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy.
There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.
"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them." Alfred Adler
"If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how?" Joan Baez
"Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him." Baudouin I of Belgium
"It would be some time before I fully realised that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy... The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States." Boutros Boutros-Ghali
"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." General Omar Bradley
"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist." Archbishop Helder Camara
"The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?" Pablo Casal
"A Politician is a patriot who is prepared to lay down your life for his country" Peter Clark
"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." Dante
"The pioneers of a warless world are the young men who refuse military service." Albert Einstein
"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." Also: "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." Dwight D. Eisenhower
"There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it." Havelock Ellis
"I hope...that mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats; for in my opinion there never was a good war, or a bad peace." Benjamin Franklin
"Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances." and "We must be the change we wish to see." Mahatma Gandhi
"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the Leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked. and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." Hermann Goering
"Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals." Also:
"I'm not disturbing the peace. I'm disturbing the war." Ammon Hennacy
"This year will go down in history... Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future." Adolf Hitler
"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." Also: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." John F. Kennedy
"Non-violence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him." Also:
"And violence is impractical, because the old eye for an eye philosophy ends up leaving everybody blind" Martin Luther King Jr.
"War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off." Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
"If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say 'Non' to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses." Louis Lecoin
"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?" Abraham Lincoln
"Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional." Max Lucade
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions." Robert Lynd (1879-1949)
"War-making doesn't stop war-making. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago." Colman McCarthy
"Nonviolence doesn't always work -- but violence never does." Madge Michaels-Cyrus
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Friedrich Nietzche
"We must have research for peace ... It would embrace the outstanding problems of morality. The time has come for man's intellect, his scientific method, to win over the immoral brutality and irrationality of war and militarism ... Now we are forced to eliminate from the world forever this vestige of prehistoric barbarism, this curse to the human race." Linus Pauling
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." Jeanette Rankin
"If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room." Anita Roddick
"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" Eleanor Roosevelt
"When the rich make war, it's the poor that die." Jean-Paul Sartre
"When men talk about defence, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think." Pat Schroeder
"Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence." Also: "Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence." Leo Tolstoy
"Violence is actually exceptional. The human race has survived because of co-operation, not aggression." Gerard Vanderhaar
"Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them more." Oscar Wilde
"In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,000 people experienced non-violent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations . . . If we add all the countries touched by major non-violent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa . . . the independence movement in India . . .) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that non-violence doesn't work in the 'real' world." Walter Wink
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