Biblio | Beyond Intractability

Very few people chose war. They chose selfishness and the result was war. Each of us, individually and nationally, must choose: total love or total war.

- Dave Dellinger

Many oppressors are also oppressed. Nonviolent confrontation is the only confrontation that allows us to respond realistically to such complexity.

- Jane Meyerding

The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. ... Only reverence can restrain violence -- reverence for human life and the environment.

- William Sloan Coffin, Jr.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

- Eleanor Roosevelt

One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of humans as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is not safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

- Helen Keller

The fragrance always remains in the hand that gives the rose.

- Heda Bejar

Just two U.S. Poseidon submarines which carry 320 nuclear weapons can destroy all the 200 major Soviet cities with the destructive potential of 1,000 Hiroshima size weapons.

- Rear Admiral Gene R. LaRocque

A solid rock is not disturbed by the wind; even so, a wise person is not agitated by praise or blame.

- Dhammapada

Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?

- William Blake

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

The people who burned witches at the stake never...thought of their act as violence...[but rather] as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.

- Gil Bailie

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

- Albert Einstein

We must be the change we wish to see.

- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.

- Heinz Pagels