Peace Quotes

Quotes are one of my favorite things. I find them to be enlightening and inspiring. I hope you read all of the quotes on my page, and I encourage you to find more quotes about peace.

"An optimist says, 'War is impossible.' A pessimist says, 'War is inevitable.' A realist says, 'War is inevitable unless we make it impossible.'" Unknown

"And violence is impractical, because the old eye for an eye philosophy ends up leaving everybody blind .. It is immoral because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for everybody. Means and ends are inseparable. The means represent the ideal in the making; in the long run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The road to devastation begins long before war does: it begins when nations and groups equip themselves for war. Preparing for war ensures that it will happen (though it may not be the war that's being prepared for). You might as well try preventing a forest fire by pouring petrol over the trees and then standing by with a box of matches."
Peace Pledge Union

"In fact aggression and revenge are deliberately incited to fuel war. Every war is backed by political and military propaganda which fires anger, hatred and impulses to attack and retaliate. This serves at least two purposes: it allows armies to believe in what they're doing, and seduces people into supporting their leaders' war policies."
Peace Pledge Union

"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men and women."
Martin Luther King Jr.

"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy... The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States."
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Former UN Secretary General

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." Mark Twain

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." Dwight David Eisenhower

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." John F. Kennedy

"If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how?" Joan Baez

"You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist."
Indira Gandhi

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." Jeanette Rankin

"When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think."
Pat Schroeder

"Am I not destroying my enemies what I make friends of them?" Abraham Lincoln

"Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional."
Max Lucade

"Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances." Mahatma Gandhi

"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 fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
Albert Einstein

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." Mohandas Gandhi

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"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

"It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell." William Tecumseh Sherman

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." John F. Kennedy

"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending." Anonymous

"War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses." Thomas Jefferson

"Wars are not acts of God. They are caused by man, by man-made institutions, by the way in which man has organized his society. What man has made, man can change." Frederick Moore Vinson

"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them." Alfred Adler

"There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used...Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they though of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed." Gil Bailie

"Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace.It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him." King Baudouin I, King of Belgium

"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." General Omar Bradley

"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."
Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist

"Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is--whether its victim is human or animal--we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity." Rachel Carson

"The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?" Pablo Casal

"We are convinced that non-violence is more powerful than violence. We are convinced that non-violence supports you if you have a just and moral cause...If you use violence, you have to sell part of yourself for that violence. Then you are no longer a master of your own struggle." Cesar Chavez

"In all of his suffering, as in all of his life and ministry, Jesus refused to defend himself with force or with violence. He endured violence and cruelty so that God's love might be fully manifest and the world might be reconciled to the One from whom it had become estranged. Even at his death, Jesus cried for forgiveness for those who were executioners: 'Father, forgive them.'" The Challenge of Peace

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." Dante

"At some ideas you stand perplexed, especially at the sight of human sins, uncertain whether to combat it by force or by human love. Always decide, "I will combat it with human love." If you make up your mind about that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a terrible force; it is the strongest of all things and there is nothing like it." Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazo

"The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service."
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

"There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it." Havelock Ellis

"I hope...that mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats; for in my opinion there never was a good war, or a bad peace." Benjamin Franklin

"We must be the change we wish to see."
Mahatma Gandhi

"If peace... only had the music and pageantry of war, there'd be no wars."
Sophie Kerr

"Everything, everything in war is barbaric . . . But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being." Ellen Key, 1916

"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off."
Karl Kraus (1874-1936)

"If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses."
Louis Lecoin, French pacifist leader

"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
Robert Lynd (1879-1949), Anglo-Irish essayist, journalist

"It is clear that the way to heal society of its violence . . . and lack of love is to replace the pyramid of domination with the circle of equality and respect." Manitonquat

"Warmaking doesn't stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago."
Colman McCarthy

"I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: 'Mother, what was war?'" Eve Merriam

"Nonviolence doesn't always work -- but violence never does." Madge Michaels-Cyrus

"We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life."
A. J. Muste

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Friedrich Nietzche

"We must have research for peace ... It would embrace the outstanding problems of morality. The time has come for man's intellect, his scientific method, to win over the immoral brutality and irrationality of war and militarism ... Now we are forced to eliminate from the world forever this vestige of prehistoric barbarism, this curse to the human race." Linus Pauling

"We are ready to retaliate, rather than forgive or gain by love and information . . . Force may subdue, but love gains. And one that forgives first wins the laurel." William Penn

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" Eleanor Roosevelt

"When the rich make war, it's the poor that die."
Jean-Paul Sartre

"Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence." Leo Tolstoy

"Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence."
Leo Tolstoy

"We challenge the culture of violence when we ourselves act in the certainty that violence is no longer acceptable, that it's tired and outdated no matter how many cling to it in the stubborn belief that it still works and that it's still valid." Gerard Vanderhaar

"The story of the human race is characterized by efforts to get along much more than by violent disputes, although it's the latter that make the history books. Violence is actually exceptional. The human race has survived because of cooperation, not aggression." Gerard Vanderhaar

"The soul of our country needs to be awakened . . .When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders." Veterans Fast for Life

"In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations . . . If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa . . . the independence movement in India . . .) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world."
-Walter Wink