Pacifism Quotes

Pacifists have usually regarded the use of violence as absolutely wrong, irrespective of its consequences. This, like other ‘no matter what’ prohibitions, assumes the validity of the distinction between acts and omissions. Without this distinction, pacifists who refuse to use violence when it is the only means of preventing greater violence would be responsible for the greater violence they fail to prevent.

~ Peter Singer

So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

~ Howard Zinn

There is no such thing as a just war. It's just war. And it's antithetical to the Gospel.

~ David D. Flowers

Generally speaking, by the way, that is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts.

~ Leon Trotsky

They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.

~ Howard Zinn

We'd be the safest country in the world if the world knew we didn't have a gun. Men are not killed because they get mad at each other. They're killed because one has a gun.

~ Jeannette Rankin

It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.

~ John Fowles

In answer to 'But violence hasn't solved anything!'The hell it hasn't. The application of violence - of killing and a willingness to be killed - on a massive scale is responsible for a lot of solutions. The most recent mass application of violence liberated Kuwait. The most recent mass application of violence on a global scale alone cleansed the world of the Third Reich. Nonviolence and passive resistance did less than nothing to stop Hitler and his henchmen. The Atlantic slave trade wasn't stopped by 'dialogue' or 'passive resistance' or conferences, but by the opened gunports of the Royal Navy; Dachau and Chang-I weren't liberated with pamphlets.

~ Markham Shaw Pyle

All beings tremble before danger, all fear death. When a man considers this, he does not kill or cause to kill.

~ Anonymous

The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass.Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.

~ Rachel Maddow

Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

DESEGREGATE THE BUSES WITH THIS 7 POINT PROGRAM:1. Pray for guidance.2. Be courteous and friendly.3. Be neat and clean.4. Avoid loud talk.5. Do not argue.6. Report incidents immediately.7. Overcome evil with good.Sponsored by Interdenominational Ministerial AllianceRev. A. L. Davis, Pres.Rev. J. E. Poindexter, Secretary

~ John Howard Griffin

Pacifism is a virtue indisguishable from cowardice.

~ Brent Weeks

Pacifism is a virtue indistinguishable from cowardice.

~ Brent Weeks

When you get right down to it, militaries are essentially legalized mafias.

~ Michelle Templet

I absolutely hate the way the United States glorifies its military and its wars. Real heroes fight for peace.

~ Michelle Templet

People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin