Biblio | Beyond Intractability

I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

- Elie Weisel

We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves cooperatively, sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth.

- Buckminster Fuller

If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed for.

- Chinese Proverb

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

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.

- William Ralph Inge

Compromise does not mean cowardice.

- John F. Kennedy

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

- William Ellery Channing

Nonviolence 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.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it stands than to anything on which it is poured.

- Anonymous

The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and errors, its successes and setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned.

- Dag Hammarskjold

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.

- Abraham Lincoln

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

- Walt Kelly

The point of nonviolence is to build...a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink...a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

- Joan Baez

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?

- Joan Baez

We have a common oppressor, a common exploiter and a common discriminator. But once we realize that we have a common enemy, then we can unite--on the basis of what we have in common.

- Malcolm X