Notable Peace & Justice Activists Posters “Ph...-Pr...-”
with curriculum enrichment resources for social studies classrooms, teachers, home schoolers, offices.

Wendell Phillips
Clarence & Lilly Pickett
Harold Pinter

Christine de Pizan
Katherine Anne Porter

Wendell Phillips
b. 11-29-1811; Boston, Massachusetts
d. 2-2-1884

Lawyer Wendell Phillips was a noted orator in the causes abolition, women's and Native American rights, and the labor movement.

Wendell Phillips quotes ~
• “What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step of something better.”
• “The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.”
• “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
• “I think the first duty of society is justice.”
• “What gunpowder has done for war, the printing press has done for the mind.”
• “Aristocracy is always cruel.”
• “One on God's side is a majority.”
• “Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.”
• “Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is a much higher and truer courage.”

Clarence & Lilly Pickett
b. 10-19-1884; Cissna Park, IL (raised in Kansas)
d. 1965

Quaker Clarence Pickett, who “represented the oppressed, the persecuted, the disadvantaged, the underdog of every color, race, religion, and nation”, served as the executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee from 1929-1950.

Harold Pinter
b. 10-10-1930; London, England
d. 12-24-2008

Playwright, screenwriter, poet, director, actor and political activist Harold Pinter was the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient for “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms.”

Pinter was married to biographer Antonia Fraser.

Harold Pinter quotes ~
• “Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.”
• “I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?”
• “I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.”

Christine de Pizan
b. c.1362; Venice, Italy
d. c.1431

Christine de Pizan was a feminist philosopher and first professional women writer in the medieval era. Her first works as a writer was to provide for her family after the death of her husband. She then became a critic of Jean de Meun who slandered women in his Romance of the Rose.

The illustration for the presentation frontispiece of Christine de Pizan presenting her Collected Works to Queen Isabeau of France consists solely of females.

Christine de Pizan quotes ~
• “Just as women’s bodies are softer than men’s, so their understanding is sharper.”
• “This woman in love with scholarship intends, to be sure, that woman should acquire learning: but it must be for the purpose of developing her intelligence, or raising her heart to serious things, not of widening her field of ambitions, dethroning man.”
• “I say it to thee again, and doubt never the contrary, that if it were the custom to put the little maidens to the school, and they were made to learn the sciences as they do to the men-children, that they should learn as perfectly, and they should be.”

Katherine Anne Porter
née Callie Russel Porter
b. 5-15-1890; Indian Creek, Texas
d. 9-18-1980; Silver Spring, MD

Katherine Anne Porter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist, is known for her insight into the dark themes of betrayal, death and the origin of human evil. Her only novel was Ship of Fools (1962).

Katherine Anne Porter quotes ~
• “Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.” ~ The Never-Ending Wrong, 1977
• “The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the founders of the 1924 Soviet Revolution, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1920 through 1927 — there are many trials such as these in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgment has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder.” ~ The Never-Ending Wrong, 1977
• “The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the extinction of these two men without a shock to the very roots of its belief in justice and humanity.” ~ referring to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, 1927
• “The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own — even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.” ~ Ship of Fools
• “There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.” ~ Writers at Work interview, 1963
• “Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist — the only thing he's good for — is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it's only his view of a meaning. That's what he's for — to give his view of life.” ~ Writers at Work interview, 1963
• “You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.” ~ Writers at Work interview, 1963

Beatrix Potter
b. 7-28-1866; London, England
d. 12-22-1943

Beatrix Potter, best remembered as creator of Peter Rabbit, played an important role in protecting some of England's most beautiful landscapes from Hill Top, her beloved Lake District farmhouse.

Beatrix Potter quote ~
• “I hate publicity, and I have contrived to survive to be an old woman without it, except in the homey atmosphere of Agricultural Shows.” [1939 interview]

• more Beatrix Potter posters

Helen Prejean, CSJ
b. 4-21-1939; Baton Rouge, LA

Sr. Helen Prejean is an advocate for ending capital punishment. She came to the general public's attention with her autobiography Dead Men Walking.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
b. 1-15-1809; France
d. 1-19-1865

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was mutualist philosopher and socialist who espoused a peaceful social revolution of workers' associations or co-operatives, and individual worker/peasant possession, over private ownership or the nationalization of land and workplaces.