Violence is the last resource of the incompetent.
— Issac Asimov —
One cannot subdue a man by holding back his hands. Lasting peace comes not from force.
— David Borenstein —
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
— Omar N. Bradley —
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
— Thomas A. Edison —
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
— Albert Einstein —
Force always attracts men of low morality.
— Albert Einstein —
Senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them!
–Albert Einstein —
Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
— Albert Einstein —
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
— Albert Einstein —
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
— Albert Einstein —
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
— Albert Einstein —
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
— Albert Einstein —
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
— Albert Einstein —
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 —
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower —
Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower —
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson —
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
— Henry Ellis —
You don’t have to have fought in a war to love peace.
— Geraldine A. Ferraro —
There was never a good war, or a bad peace.
— Benjamin Franklin —
A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met in its path but also shattered our pride in the achievements of civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes for a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we regarded as changeless.
— Sigmund Freud —
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
— David Friedman —
An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
— Mohandas Gandhi —
It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.
— Andre Gide —
The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned.
— Dag Hammarskjold —
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
— Ernest Hemingway —
War makes thieves and peace hangs them.
— George Herbert —
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
— Herbert Hoover —
It is a little embarrassing that, after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.
— Aldous Huxley —
Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
— Thomas Jefferson —
The first casualty when war comes is truth.
— Hiram Johnson —
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
— Martin Luther King, Jr. —
The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.
— John F. Kennedy —
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.
— John F. Kennedy —
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.
— Robert E. Lee —
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
— Thomas Mann —
That war is a moral and political disaster – a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.
— George McGovern —
I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
— George McGovern —
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
— H. L. Mencken —
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
— Jose Narosky —
Fair peace becomes men; ferocious anger belongs to beasts.
— Ovid —
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
— George Orwell —
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
— Blaise Pascal —
It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
— Eleanor Roosevelt —
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes strong than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt —
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt —
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt —
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt —
War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
— Bertrand Russell —
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
— Bertrand Russell —
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
— Bertrand Russell —
When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.
— Jean-Paul Sartre —
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
— Arthur Schopenhauer —
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge – even to ourselves – that we’ve been so credulous.
— Carl Sagan —
A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.
— William Shakespeare —
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.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley —
The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.
— Louis Simpson —
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
— Baruch Spinoza —
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
— Mother Teresa —
Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace.
— Charles Sumner —
What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
— Henry David Thoreau —
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
— Barbara Tuchman —
All war is deception.
— Sun Tzu —
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
— Voltaire —
If we don’t end war, war will end us.
— H. G. Wells —
The military don’t start wars. Politicians start wars.
— William Westmoreland —
Peace hath higher tests of manhood, than battle ever knew.
— John Greenleaf Whittier —