User account | Beyond Intractability

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

- George Bernard Shaw

The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.

- Cesar Chavez

When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think.

- Pat Schroeder

Sensitivity to the immense needs of humanity brings with it a spontaneous rejection of the arms race, which is incompatible with the all out struggle against hunger, sickness, under-development and illiteracy.

- Pope John Paul II

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.

- Nelson Mandela

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 point of nonviolence is to build...a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink...a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

- Joan Baez

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

- Albert Einstein

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

- William Ellery Channing

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.

- A.J. Muste

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 disturbing the peace. I'm disturbing the war.

- Ammon Hennacy

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