User account | Beyond Intractability

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

- Leo Tolstoy

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.

- Abraham Lincoln

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

- Bertrand Russell

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

- Mark Twain

Peace is not the product of a victory or a command. It has no finishing line, no final deadline, no fixed definition of achievement. Peace is a never-ending process, the work of many decisions.

- Oscar Arias

You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you.

- Rwandan Proverb

Gandhi once declared that it was his wife who unwittingly taught him the effectiveness of nonviolence. Who better than women should know that battles can be won without resort to physical strength?

- Barbara Deming

Don't ever let them pull you down so low as to hate them. (also cited as: I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.)

- Booker T. Washington

I do admit that the destructive energy is there, but it is evanescent, always futile before the creative, which is permanent.

- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

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

- William Ellery Channing

I'm not disturbing the peace. I'm disturbing the war.

- Ammon Hennacy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

- Charles Darwin

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

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

- Mark Twain