User account | Beyond Intractability

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

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

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

- Havelock Ellis

Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them more.

- Oscar Wilde

I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody.

- Benjamin Franklin

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

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

Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

- Abraham Lincoln

I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.

- Malcolm X

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

- Dhammapada

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

- William E. Gladstone

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'm not really interested in persuading people, I don't want to and I try to make this point obvious. What I'd like to do is to help people persuade themselves.

- Noam Chomsky