User account | Beyond Intractability

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

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.

- Indira Gandhi

The longer we listen to one another -- with real attention -- the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.

- Barbara Deming

There is no such thing as defeat in non-violence.

- Cesar Chavez

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.

- Helder Camara

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.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

- Jonathan Kozol

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

No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger that its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise.

- Marian Anderson

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

- Helen Keller

Historians are among the major enemies of the human race, interested only in the glorification of war and the despicable concept of national greatness.

- Kenneth Boulding

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

- Hildegarde Goss-Mayr

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

- Malcolm X

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

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

- Albert Einstein