User account | Beyond Intractability

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

- Leo Tolstoy

To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.

- Confucius

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

Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals.

- Ammon Hennacy

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

- Albert Einstein

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The ugliest is that man who thinks nothing is worth fighting and dying for and lets men better and braver than himself protect him.

- John Stuart Mill

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.

- Albert Camus

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.

- Malcolm X

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

Hatred injures the hater as well as the hated. Love blesses the lover as well as the loved. This is hard economics as well as good common sense.

- Kenneth Boulding

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle of reason in the throat.

- John Boyes

When we yield to discouragement it is usually because we give too much thought to the past and to the future.

- Therese of Lisieux

While seeking revenge, dig two graves -- one for yourself.

- Doug Horton

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 otherwise might.

- Marian Anderson