Peace Quotes

It is far easier to make war than peace.

~ Georges Clémenceau

My child, you are going to be a great king; do not imitate me in the taste I have had for building, or in that I have had for war; try, on the contrary, to be at peace with your neighbors.

~ Louis Xiv

War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.

~ William Mckinley

The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

~ Tony Blair

War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.

~ Benito Mussolini

People always make war when they say they love peace.

~ D. H. Lawrence

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.

~ Lester B. Pearson

When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn't over for the veterans, or the family. It's just starting.

~ Karl Marlantes

War is a racket. It always has been... A few profit - and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

~ Smedley Butler

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

~ William Hazlitt

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

~ Benjamin Franklin

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.

~ Martin Luther King

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

~ Victor Hugo

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.

~ Queen Elizabeth Ii

I may not lead the most dramatic life, but in my brain it's 'War and Peace' everyday.

~ Rufus Wainwright

When I was a young man, I was poor. In a war with other nations, I was in eighty-seven fights. There I received my name and was made Chief of my nation. But now I am old and am for peace.

~ Red Cloud

We believe in peace in the settlement of all disputes through peaceful means, in the abolition of war, and, more particularly, nuclear war.

~ Lal Bahadur Shastri

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

~ Woody Allen

Mankind will never win lasting peace so long as men use their full resources only in tasks of war. While we are yet at peace, let us mobilize the potentialities, particularly the moral and spiritual potentialities, which we usually reserve for war.

~ John Foster Dulles

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

In time of peace prepare for war.

~ Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

One can go to war alone, but you can't build peace alone.

~ Jacques Chirac

If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.

~ Oswald Spengler

Laws are the terms by which independent and isolated men united to form a society, once they tired of living in a perpetual state of war where the enjoyment of liberty was rendered useless by the uncertainty of its preservation. They sacrificed a portion of this liberty so that they could enjoy the remainder in security and peace.

~ Cesare Beccaria

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

~ John Foster Dulles

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

~ Winston Churchill

If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

~ Omar N. Bradley

Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr

We must fight for peace bravely as we fought in war.

~ Lal Bahadur Shastri

To secure peace is to prepare for war.

~ Carl Von Clausewitz

I know that military alliances and armament have been the reliance for peace for centuries, but they do not produce peace; and when war comes, as it inevitably does under such conditions, these armaments and alliances but intensify and broaden the conflict.

~ Frank B. Kellogg

The primary, the fundamental, the essential purpose of the United Nations is to keep peace. Everything it does which helps prevent World War III is good. Everything which does not further that goal, either directly or indirectly, is at best superfluous.

~ Henry Cabot Lodge

You ask me if I will not be glad when the last battle is fought, so far as the country is concerned I, of course, must wish for peace, and will be glad when the war is ended, but if I answer for myself alone, I must say that I shall regret to see the war end.

~ George Armstrong Custer

In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war.

~ Robert M. La Follette

I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.

~ Abba Eban

I think what the Nobel committee is doing is going beyond war and looking at what humanity can do to prevent war. Sustainable management of our natural resources will promote peace.

~ Wangari Maathai

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

~ George Herbert