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Lord Acton ~
• “There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another, either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye.”
Alfred Adler ~
• “Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.”
Hannah Arendt ~
• “Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
Aristophanes ~
• “The wise learn many things from their foes.”
Aristotle ~
• “All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.”
• “Law is mind without reason.”
• “It is in justice that the ordering of society is centered.”
• “Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.”
• “Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.”
• “The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.”
• “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
Margaret Atwood ~
• “War is what happens when language fails.”
James Baldwin ~
• “Ignorance allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
Honoré de Balzac ~
• “It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.”
Jacques Barzun ~
• “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.”
St Basil the Great ~
• “The bread you do not use is the bread of the hungry. The garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of the person who is naked. The shoes you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot. The money you keep locked away is the money of the poor. The acts of charity you do not perform are the injustices you commit.”
Nicholas Black Elk ~
• “The first peace which is the most important is that which comes from the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka and that the center is everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between two nations until there is first known true peace within the soul of man.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ~
• “There is no way to peace along the way to safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture.”
Omar Bradley ~
• “We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”
Elias Canetti ~
• “Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.”
Thomas Carlyle ~
• “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.”
Cesar Chavez ~
• “Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak . . . Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.”
• “History will judge societies and governments — and their institutions — not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.”
Lydia Maria Child ~
• “A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.”
• “It is my mission to help in the breaking down of classes, and to make all men feel as if they were brethren of the same family, sharing the same rights, the same capabilities, and the same responsibilities. While my hand can hold a pen, I will use it to this end; and while my brain can earn a dollar, I will devote it to this end.”
William Congreve ~
• “Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.”
Rita Dove ~
• “If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.”
John Dryden ~
• “Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.”
Rene Dubos ~
• “Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.” Celebrations of Life, 1981
Marian Wright Edelman ~
• “You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.”
Albert Einstein ~
• “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. You cannot subjugate a nation forcibly unless you wipe out every man, woman, and child. Unless you wish to use such drastic measures, you must find a way of settling your disputes without resort to arms.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower ~
• “We look upon this shaken Earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose — the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails. The building of such a peace is a bold and solemn purpose. To proclaim it is easy. To serve it will be hard.” ~ 2nd Inaugural
• “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”
Erasmus ~
• “The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.”
• “He who allows oppression shares the crime.”
Franz Fanon ~
• “What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
• “Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.”
• “The life of the nation is shot through with a certain falseness and hypocrisy, which are all the more tragic because they are so often subconscious rather than deliberate ... The soul of the people is putrescent, and until that becomes regenerate and clean, no good work can be done.”
• “He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me.”
Michel Foucault ~
• “Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.”
Anne Frank ~
• “I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”
Viktor Frankl ~
• “Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Benjamin Franklin ~
• “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”
Erich Fromm ~
• “Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”
• “Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
• “Authority is not a quality one person “has,” in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.”
Mahatma Gandhi ~
• “The cry for peace will be a cry in the wilderness, so long as the spirit of nonviolence does not dominate millions of men and women.”
• “If we are to reach real peace in this world and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with children; and if they will grow up in their natural innocence, we won’t have to struggle, we won’t have to pass fruitless idle resolutions. But we shall go from love to love and peace to peace, until at last all the corners of the world are covered with that peace and love for which, consciously or unconsciously, the whole world is hungering.”
• “An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.”
André Gide ~
• “It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labour of peace.”
Moss Hart ~
• “Boredom is the keynote of poverty – of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with – for where there is no money there is no change of any kind.”
Vaclav Havel ~
• “Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.”
• “Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.”
William Hazlitt ~
• “Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.”
• “A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile can work wonders and accomplish miracles.”
Seamus Heaney ~
• “Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.”
Robert Heinlein ~
• “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.”
• “One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.”
Joseph Heller ~
• “Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.”
Lillian Hellman ~
• “Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?”
Horace ~
• “A good and faithful judge ever prefers the honorable to the expedient.”
Julia Ward Howe ~
• “Disarm, disarm. The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.”
William Dean Howells ~
• “Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs; we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it is futile to, spurn them, or lash them for trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives which underlie our economic life.”
Elbert Hubbard ~
• “Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.”
Henry Ibsen ~
• “Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.”
Robert G. Ingersoll ~
• “Justice should remove the bandage from her eyes long enough to distinguish between the vicious and the unfortunate.”
Henry James ~
• “Deep experience is never peaceful.”
Samuel Johnson ~
• “A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.”
• “To push advantages too far is neither generous nor just.
Immanuel Kant ~
• “In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.”
• “May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.”
Martin L. King, Jr. ~
• “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Charles Lamb ~
• “The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.”
Lao Tzu ~
• “Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”
Halldor Laxness ~
• “War has always been the chief amusement of mankind. Other amusements are a surrogate for war.”
Gerda Lerner ~
• “In this age, when warfare involving major nations has become unthinkable, the theories and practice of transforming social movements offer the only real hope for social change. Feminism represents such a movement.”
Walter Lippman ~
• “In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.”
Jack London ~
• “Charity is the bone you share with your dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.”
Andre Malraux ~
• “War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.”
Thomas Mann ~
• “War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”
Guy de Maupassant ~
• “Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.”
• “Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.”
Thomas Merton ~
• “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.”
Stanley Milgram ~
• “It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. The fact that obedience is often a necessity in human society does not diminish our responsibility as citizens. Rather, it confers on us a special obligation to place in positions of authority those most likely to use it humanely. And people are inventive. The variety of political forms we have seen in history are only several of many possible political arrangements. Perhaps the next step is to invent and to explore political forms that will give conscience a better chance to resist errant authority.”
Henry Miller ~
• “If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”
Ogden Nash ~
• “I often wonder which is mine: Tolerance, or a rubber spine.”
Pablo Neruda ~
• “Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.”
Francois Rabelais ~
• “I won't undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.”
Samuel Richardson ~
• “The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.”
Romain Rolland ~
• “A hero is a man who does what he can.”
Muriel Rukeyser ~
• “As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.”
• “Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness.”
George Sand ~
• “Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery ~
• “Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.”
Friedrich Schiller ~
• “A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.”
Arthur Schopenhauer ~
• “Compassion is the basis of all morality.”
Mary Godwin Shelley ~
• “It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
• “Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.”
• “Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Baruch Spinoza ~
• “Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”
• “In fact, the real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.”
John Steinbeck ~
• “If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”
Tom Stoppard ~
• “I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”
Sun Tzu ~
• “Possessions make you poor, wealth is measurable only in experience.”
Emanual Swedenborg ~
• “True charity is the desire to be useful to others with no thought of recompense.”
Tacitus ~
• “You can accomplish by kindness what you cannot by force.”
Thucydides ~
• “Wars spring from unseen and generally insignificant causes, the first outbreak being often but an explosion of anger.”
J.R.R. Tolkien ~
• “The world is full enough of hurts and mischance without wars to multiply them.”
Mark Twain ~
• “Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out ... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel ... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for ‘the universal brotherhood of man’ - with his mouth.” more Mark Twain quotes
Voltaire ~
• “Prejudice is opinion without judgement.”
• “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
• “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
Joost van den Vondel ~
• “The Golden Rule is of no use to you whatever unless you realize it is your move.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ~
• “We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.”
• “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
• “Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone’.”
Elie Wiesel ~
• “There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.”
E. B. White ~
• “The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.”
• “One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.”
• “Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.”
Walt Whitman ~
• “Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.”
Malcolm X ~
• “Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.”
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