Key Quotations on Peace and Nonviolence

Important Quotes

“You can no more win a war than win an earthquake.” ~Jeannette Ranking

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons…We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. [can replace all –isms with terrorism; makes sense]

“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence—when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We are not dealing with a conventional war. We cannot respond in a conventional manner. I do not want to see this spiral out of control. This crisis involves issues of national security, foreign policy, public safety, intelligence gathering, economics, and murder. Our response must be equally multifaceted.” ~Representative Barbara Lee

“We must not rush to judgment. Far too many innocent people have already died. Our country is in mourning. If we rush to launch a counterattack, we run too great a risk that women, children, and other non-combatants will be caught in the crossfire.” ~Representative Barbara Lee

“Nonviolence cannot win every struggle—there are defeats. This is no more reason to abandon nonviolence than the military would give up its weapons if it lost battle. Philosophic note: in every military struggle there is a winner and a loser, so half the time violence fails, and half the time it wins. But in nonviolent struggle the objective is not to have a victor but to change the situation itself—a radically different concept… Having admitted our approach cannot win all battles, why does it work at all? Why did it work against the Nazis in Norway and Denmark, or against the power structure in the American South? Or against the British in India? ~David McReynolds

“Denmark had not won the war but neither had it been defeated or destroyed. Most Danes had not been brutalized, by the Germans or each other. Nonviolent resistance saved the country and contributed more to the Allied victory than Danish arms ever could have done.” ~A Force More Powerful by Steve York

“But wasn’t it necessary, after all, to stop Hitler? Sure it was; it was necessary, in fact, not to let him get started. But of all the ways to stop Hitler or to keep him from getting started, war was the worst—the way that inflicted the most pain, the most suffering, the most damage on everyone—especially Hitler’s victims. A few months ago, when I read and reviewed Howard Zinn’s latest book, Declarations of Independence, I was deeply moved by the account of his moral and intellectual journey from WWII bombardier to pacifist. Zinn offers persuasive evidence that the war magnified rather than diminished Nazi atrocities. And he writes, “History is full of instances of successful resistance (although we are not informed very much about this) without violence and against tyranny, by people using strikes, boycotts, propaganda, and a dozen ingenious forms of struggle..I believe in ingenious, nonviolent struggle for justice and against oppression. So I won’t support our troops…perpetuating a cycle of human violence.” ~Erwin Knoll

“History is the winner’s version of what happened.” ~Howard Zinn

“The Danes were able to do what they did because they were able to make decisions that were based on clear convictions about which they all agreed and which were in accord with the inner truth of man’s own rational nature, as well as in accordance with the fundamental law of God in the Old Testament as well as in the Gospel: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The Danes were able to resist the cruel stupidity of Nazi anti-Semitism because this fundamental truth was important to them. And because they were willing, in unanimous and concerted action, to stake their lives on this truth. In a word, such action becomes possible where fundamental truths are taken seriously.” ~Thomas Merton

“An Eager Bonmardier

My own first impressions of something called war had come at the age of ten, when I read with excitement a series of books about “the boy allies”: A French boy...and a Russian boy, who became friends, united in the wonderful cause to defeat Germany in WWI. It was an adventure, a romance, told in a group of stories about comradeship and heroism. It was war cleansed of death and suffering.

If anything was left of that romantic view of war, it was totally extinguished when, at 18, I read a book by a Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo called Johnny Got His Gun. It is perhaps, the most powerful antiwar novel ever written.

Her was war in it ultimate horror. A slab of flesh in an American uniform had been found on the battlefield, till alive, with no legs, no arms, no face, blind, deaf, unable to speak, but he heart still beating, the brain still functioning, able to think about his past, ponder his present condition, and wonder if he will ever be able to communicate with the world outside.

For him, the oratory of the politicians who sent him off to war—the language of freedom, democracy, and justice—is now seen as the ultimate hypocrisy. A mute, thinking torso on a hospital bed, he finds a way to communicate with a kindly nurse, and when a visiting delegation of military brass comes by to pin a medal on his body, he taps out a message. He says: Take me into the workplaces, into the schools, show me to the little children and to the college students, let them see what war is like…Take me wherever there are parliaments and diets and congresses and chambers of statesmen. I want to be there when they talk about honor and justice and making the world safe for democracy…Let them talk more munitions and airplanes and battleships and tanks and gases and why of course we’ve got to have them we can’t get along without them how in the world could we protect the peace if we didn’t have them…But before they vote on them before they give the order for all the little guys to start killing each other let the main guy rap his gavel on my case and point down at me and say here gentlemen is the only issue before this house and that is are you for this thing here or are you against it…Johnny Got His Gun had a shattering effect on me when I read it. It left me with a bone-deep hatred of war.” ~Howard Zinn

“they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being ‘crazy’ about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness… This attitude—that nothing is easier than to love has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations and, yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure and to learn how one could do better—or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems to be only on adequate way to overcome the failure of love—to examine the reasons for this failure and to proceed to study the meaning of love.” ~Erich Fromm

“While married women must adapt to the perimeters of their marriages, single women can expand in all directions, developing as they will… Women who have had a chance to find out who they are don’t need as much reassurance from men… Our times are obsessed with finding fulfillment, so they are times of more than the usual strain between men and women and a good deal of that strain is blamed on marriage, although it should not be. There was a movie called Lovers and Other Strangers which had a scene in which a son tries to tell his Italian father that he and his wife of only a few years have decided to get a divorce because, as he puts it, ‘We feel there must be something more.’ The father, not understanding what that has to do with anything, answers, his eyebrows raised for an explanation, ‘We all feel there must be something more,’ to which his son replies, ‘Then why don’t you leave Mom and get out and get it, Dad?’ And the old man shoots back, ‘Because there isn’t something more!’” ~Merle Shain

“Family meetings are probably the most important single mechanism for promoting peace and cooperation in the home and communicating family values. The more input children have in family decision making, the more likely they are to internalize the values we adults are trying to share and the less resistance we will encounter in trying to live the values of peace, justice and simplicity of lifestyle. These family discussions and decisions force family members to explain their reasons, providing adults especially with a regular opportunity to communicate their values.” ~James and Kathleen McGinnis

“Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq—a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15—this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare—this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the US Senate.” ~Senator Robert Byrd

“As Iraq continues to degenerate into sectarian violence and civil war, I think it important that we talk, vet to vet. Real talk, talk from the heart, as we did back in Iraq…” ~Camillo “Mac” Bica

“Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.”

“In joining the Army, my son was following in his father’s footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier—brave and steadfast and irrepressible…I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.” ~Andrew J. Bacevich

“Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval [hospitals] and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes…There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor, or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes.” ~Senator George McGovern 1970

“Picture yourself in this situation. You’ve been convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. You are indigent, functionally illiterate and mildly retarded. Your court-appointed lawyer tells you that you have the right to appeal your conviction and sentence but that he will no longer represent you. You have been moved into the death house. Your only choice is for you to represent yourself. You must file something with the court or be executed in less than 14 days. You have the right to file a petition for certiorari or a petition for habeas corpus and a motion for a stay of execution. But before you can file you must learn to read, write, overcome your retardation, obtain your trial transcript, understand the science of law, learn how to conduct legal research, analyze vast amounts of case law, formulate your issues, learn all the rules, understand civil procedure, constitutional law, criminal law and acquire the art of legal writing. You must do all of this and much more in less than 14 days in order to exercise your right to appeal.” ~ Joe Giarratano wrote what it is like to be Earl Washington

“Over the past two decades, efforts to balance these competing constitutional commands have been to no avail,” he despaired. “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” ~Harry Blackmun: thought death penalty out to be unconstitutional under all circumstances (practical abolitionist- system isn’t working). Lewis Powell came to the same conclusion a few years after his retirement, when his opinion no longer made any difference. But the rest of the Court tinkered on.

“By the 1990s it was clear to lawyers practicing in the field that the major determinants of who lived and who dies were not the statutory aggravating and mitigating circumstances. Whether a defendant was charged with capital or noncapital murder depended largely on whether the prosecutor was up for reelection, whether the county had enough left in the year’s budget for an expensive capital trial, whether the local newspapers were publicizing the case, whether the victim’s family members wanted the prosecutor to seek death (and, if so, how much influence they had), whether the defense lawyer was sophisticated enough to badger the prosecutor with pretrial motions, and a host of other factors that could be found in no statute. Whether a jury would return a death sentence depended in part on the awfulness of the crime and the criminal, but also on the relative skill of the lawyers, the social standing of the victim, the willingness of the victim’s friends and family to testify, the unarticulated beliefs of the twelve people who had been selected for the jury, and a variety of circumstances that were likewise unexpressed in the written law.” ~Stuart Banner (practical abolitionist)

“About two-thirds of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel…Yet too often this behavior is not singled out and identified for what it is. When a prosecutor puts a witness on the stand whom he knows to be lying, or fails to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, or when a police officer manufactures or destroys evidence to further the likelihood of a conviction, then it is deceptive to term these conscious violations of the law—all of which I found in my research—as merely mistakes or errors…Mistakes are good-faith errors—like taking the wrong exit off the highway, or dialing the wrong telephone number. There is no malice behind them. However, when officers of the court conspire to convict a defendant of first-degree murder and send him to death row, they are doing much more than making an innocent mistake or error. They are breaking the law.” ~Richard Moran

“Q: Other animals eat each other. Why can’t we eat them? A: Predators in the wild kill other animals out of necessity. Without doing it, they would not survive. Humans, on the other hand, kill other animals by choice. The human body has no need for animal flesh whatsoever. In fact, it has even been proven consistently that a vegan (pure vegetarian) diet is far healthier than a diet rich in animal products. Eating animals is not necessary for human survival. Rather, it is a matter of morality: Is it acceptable to inflict unconscionable suffering and death unto countless animals for something that is indisputably unnecessary?” ~Paul Shapiro

“It may surprise many who are familiar with my work that I have become interested in the plight of animals at a time in which there seems to be more human misery and injustice than ever before. I have given considerable thought to this question, and I have resolved any doubts in favor of speaking against exploitation of nonhuman animals. It seems to me that there are at least two important reasons for taking animal rights seriously.

First, I cannot help thinking that our exploitation of animals has a direct link to our exploitation of our perennial human victims: African-Americans, poor whites, Latinos, women, lesbians and gays, social activists, Native Americans, and Asians, to name a few disempowered groups. As Tom Regan, Peter Singer, and other philosophers have argued so persuasively, ‘speciesism,’ or the use of species to determine membership in the moral community, is no more morally justifiable than using race, sex, or age to determine who has rights and who does not. If we are specieist and feel that we may exploit nonhumans simply because we are more powerful, and we judge that we will benefit from that exploitation, the discrimination against other disadvantaged groups becomes that much easier.

Second, and perhaps more important, is that it is unjust to the animals themselves to deny them their rights, irrespective of any salutary effect that it may have on relations among humans. Like us, animals are individuals with interests. Their value does not depend on their use to us any more than does the inherent value of a human being depend on that person’s use to others. Justice for nonhumans requires that we recognize that all sentient beings have inherent worth that does not depend on our humanocentric and patriarchal valuation of that worth.” ~ William Kunstler

“We call it meat…but we should really call it chemical ridden…” ~Carol J. Adams

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men.” ~Alice Walker