User account | Beyond Intractability

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

- William Ellery Channing

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

- Joan Baez

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

People try nonviolence for a week and when it doesn't 'work' they go back to violence, which hasn't worked for centuries.

- Theodore Roszak

War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.

- Karl Kraus

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

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

- Anonymous

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

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

- Hannah Arendt

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

Those for whom peace is no more than a dream are asleep to the future.

- Jack DuVall

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.

- Abraham Lincoln

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

The only final good is the quality of human life.

- Kenneth Boulding

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

- Heda Bejar