Biblio | Beyond Intractability

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.

- Louis Lecoin

Let all bear in mind that a society is judged not so much by the standards attained by its more affluent and privileged members as by the quality of life which it is able to assure for its weakest members.

- H.E. Javier Perez de Cuellar

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

- George Bernard Shaw

Peace is the work of justice indirectly, in so far as justice removes the obstacles to peace; but it is the work of charity (love) directly, since charity, according to its very notion, causes peace.

- Thomas Aquinas

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

- Coretta Scott King

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

- Bertrand Russell

The first essential characteristics of nonviolent action is that it is creative.

- Hildegarde Goss-Mayr

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

Disappointment, failure, and frustration are the main agents of change. Success is a poor teacher, for it usually only confirms us in what we thought we already knew.

- Kenneth Boulding

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

- Jane Addams

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

- J. K. Galbraith

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

- Jane Meyerding

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.

- Dorothy Thompson

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

- J. K. Galbraith