User account | Beyond Intractability

We challenge the culture of violence when we ourselves act in the certainty that violence is no longer acceptable, that it's tired and outdated no matter how many cling to it in the stubborn belief that it still works and that it's still valid.

- Gerard Vanderhaar

I have great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.

- Septima Poinsette Clark

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.

- John F. Kennedy

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

- Albert Camus

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

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

- Bertrand Russell

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

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

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

- Confucius

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

- Susan B. Anthony

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

- Thomas Merton

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

- Steve Biko

No one is so foolish as to prefer to peace, war, in which, instead of sons burying their fathers, fathers bury their sons.

- Croesus

The...human race is characterized by efforts to get along much more than by violent disputes, although it's the latter that make the history books. Violence is actually exceptional. The human race has survived because of cooperation.

- Gerard Vanderhaar

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

- Nelson Mandela