Biblio | Beyond Intractability

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

- Henry David Thoreau

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

Nobody was born nonviolent. No one was born charitable. None of us comes to these things by nature but only by conversion. The first duty of the nonviolent community is helping its members...come to conversion.

- Lanza del Vasto

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

- Thomas Merton

The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.

- Cesar Chavez

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

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

- Albert Einstein

Sensitivity to the immense needs of humanity brings with it a spontaneous rejection of the arms race, which is incompatible with the all out struggle against hunger, sickness, under-development and illiteracy.

- Pope John Paul II

Information is the currency of democracy.

- Thomas Jefferson

No man is an island entire of itself ... any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne

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

- Dhammapada

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever.

- Lord Chesterfield

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

- Abraham Lincoln

I do admit that the destructive energy is there, but it is evanescent, always futile before the creative, which is permanent.

- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi