Top 100 Quotes About Pacifism
#1. Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.
David Mitchell
#2. Being a pacifist to save your own life is normal, being a pacifist for the lives of others is true pacifism.
Ammon Hennacy
#3. The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.
Freeman Dyson
#4. Once your eyes get opened to pacifism, you can't shut them again. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. You may bitterly regret the fact that you happen to be one of the tiny minority of the human race who have caught this angle of vision, but you can't help it.
Muriel Lester
#5. The statement by Paul McCartney that, although he was a pacifist, he couldn't be at this time of war. Which is as daft as being a vegetarian between meals.
Mark Steel
#6. They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
Howard Zinn
#8. Nothing doth worse become a man (I will not say a Christian man) than war.
Desiderius Erasmus
#9. We believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does ... unless conquered from the outside by military force?
George Orwell
#10. I find it significant that most military veterans become pacifists.
Michel Templet
#12. I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead in hopes that the predators would move to an actual fight.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#13. Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much
who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.
Kurt Vonnegut
#14. Pacifism, to me, is primarily a way of actively struggling against injustice and inhumanity; My kind of pacifism may be called "non-violent resistance".
Dwight Macdonald
#15. Perhaps you couldn't help being angry... but you could certainly stop yourself from repaying one offense with another.
Gail Carson Levine
#16. Wild Goose exemplifies how the Evangelical Left translates 'social justice' into Big Government and pacifism.
Mark Tooley
#17. Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
William Faulkner
#19. The main problem with pacifism is that it doesn't work in all situations. The main problem with pacifists is that they're convinced it does.
Burt Prelutsky
#20. The conflict between pacifism and socialism ultimately reflects a greater quandary of how one engages with such a system.
Hal Duncan
#21. The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.
Mahatma Gandhi
#22. Having been to war myself, I do not understand why so many people are so in love with it.
Michel Templet
#23. Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are prepared to live with the consequences.
George Orwell
#24. Say what you want but you NEVER say it with violence!
Gerard Way
#25. I think it's good to smile at everybody so that everyone knows you love everyone. It's good for human pacifism.
Aimee Bender
#26. It's not that he's choosing me, a girl he met less than a month ago
he's choosing a world in which no one has to die.
Amie Kaufman
#27. Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accept the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay-and claims a halo for his dishonesty.
Robert A. Heinlein
#28. My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.
Albert Einstein
#29. Pacifism, not murder, is precedent. To say that war presupposes peace begs the question; it does not explain how violent impulses can be overcome. In
Sarah LaChance Adams
#30. Please be peaceful. We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence, I want you to love your enemies ... for what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just
and God is with us.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#31. If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.
Errico Malatesta
#32. The goal of pacifism is possible only though a supranational organization. To stand unconditionally for this cause is the criterion of true pacifism.
Albert Einstein
#33. 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
#35. Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity
Stephen King
#36. The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a 'case', obscuring the opponent's point of view and avoiding awkward questions.
George Orwell
#37. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
George Orwell
#38. A pacifism which can see the cruelties only of occasional military warfare and is blind to the continuous cruelties of our social system is worthless.
Mahatma Gandhi
#39. Pacifism is a virtue indistinguishable from cowardice.
Brent Weeks
#40. Vichy emerged not only from what divided the French but also what united them: pacifism, fear of population decline, loss of confidence in national identity, anti-Semitism, discontent with existing political institutions, ambivalence about modernity. The existence of this common
Julian T. Jackson
#42. If there were any justice," said Shale, "one ought to be allowed to use ardent militarists for experiments in peacetime, if one uses pacifists in war. But I suppose they wouldn't volunteer.
Nigel Balchin
#43. Those who naively credit Gandhi with a conscientious or consistent pacifism might wish to ask if this did not amount to letting the Japanese imperialists do his fighting for him.
Christopher Hitchens
#44. Pacifism is a virtue indisguishable from cowardice.
Brent Weeks
#45. Surely there is nothing so ungracious, nor nothing so cruel, but men will hold therewith, if it be once approved by custom.
Desiderius Erasmus
#47. Going to say it anyway," said Graff. "Poor fool of a boy. Pacifism only works with an enemy that can't bear to do murder against the innocent. How many times are you lucky enough to get an enemy like that?
Orson Scott Card
#48. Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.
Max Lerner
#50. Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.
Vladimir Lenin
#51. As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option, we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.
Stanley Hauerwas
#52. Pacifism means letting the non-pacifists have control ... Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage war again, the colored will act differently and become rulers of the world.
Oswald Spengler
#53. Absolute hospitality would in no way amount to the absence of violence. To the contrary, it would enthrone violence precisely under the guise of nonviolence because it would leave the violators unchanged and the consequences of violence unremedied.
Miroslav Volf
#54. Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
George Orwell
#56. Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.
Malcolm X
#57. We must begin to inculcate our children against militarism by educating them in the spirit of pacifism. Our schoolbooks glorify war and conceal it's horror. I would teach peace rather than war.
Albert Einstein
#58. There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.
George Bernard Shaw
#59. Because most of us recognize that we will fight to protect our children, we cannot be absolute pacifists.
Nel Noddings
#60. The friends of Galtieri, Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar and Milosevic make unconvincing defenders of humanitarian values, and it can be seen that their inept and sometimes inane arguments lack either the principles or the seriousness that are required in such debates.
Christopher Hitchens
#61. The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#62. At the opposite end of the spectrum from pacifism, we have a pusillanimous reluctance to use religious names for warring factions. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and 'Loyalists' respectively.
Richard Dawkins
#63. There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for.
Mahatma Gandhi
#64. Among pacifists it was above all the English who always insisted on the importance of disarmament. They said that the man in the street would not understand the kind of pacifism that neglected to demand immediate restriction of armaments.
Ludwig Quidde
#65. Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil!
Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business.
Aristophanes
#66. I absolutely hate the way the United States glorifies its military and its wars. Real heroes fight for peace.
Michel Templet
#67. We being satiate with continual wars, let the desire of peace a little move us.
Desiderius Erasmus
#69. Jesus preached socialism and pacifism," I say, "which is wrong and un-American since it discourages entrepreneurship and doesn't support our troops, but I'm a Christian so I forgive him.
James Marshall
#70. Moreover [pacifists] do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries
George Orwell
#71. If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.
George Orwell
#72. There is a point when a structure fire is raging out of control that you simply have to give it the distance to burn itself out. So you move back to safety, to a hill out of the wind, and you watch the building eat itself alive.
Jodi Picoult
#73. For me personally and for most other Americans, this commitment to peace and diplomacy does not imply a blind or total pacifism. There are times when war is justified, and for many centuries the moral criteria for violence have been carefully delineated.
Jimmy Carter
#74. But you invite ... "
"I invite a bit of military nonsense."
"That's what I ... "
"Duncan, I am a teacher. Remember that. By repetition, I impress the lesson."
"What lesson?"
"The ultimately suicidal nature of military foolishness.
Frank Herbert
#75. Pacifism is a nice idea but it can get you killed. We're not there yet. Evolution is slow, small pox is fast.
George Carlin
#76. A pacifist between wars is like a vegetarian between meals.
Ammon Hennacy
#77. 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
#78. Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes - affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism - the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.
Victor Davis Hanson
#79. So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.
Howard Zinn
#80. All beings tremble before danger, all fear death. When a man considers this, he does not kill or cause to kill.
Anonymous
#81. The speaker calls for a careful examination of Christ's principle of turning the other cheek before we use it as a demand or excuse for total personal pacifism. After all, when literally struck on the cheek, Jesus did question the legitimacy of the authority by which this was done.
John Thackway
#82. It would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war.
Hermann Hesse
#83. And do you know another thing, Arthur? Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds.
T.H. White
#84. In actual fact the pacifistic-humane idea is perfectly all right perhaps when the highest type of man has previously conquered and subjected the world to an extent that makes him the sole ruler of this earth ... Therefore, first struggle and then perhaps pacifism.
Adolf Hitler
#86. There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.
Albert Dietrich
#87. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle [World War II], while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.
George Orwell
#88. When you get right down to it, militaries are essentially legalized mafias.
Michel Templet
#89. 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
#90. There has never been a time in my life when I felt that I could take a gun and shoot down a fellow-being. In this respect I am a Quaker.
D.L. Moody
#91. If I went on a killing spree that left thousands of people dead, I'd be branded as the worst kind of criminal. So why it is okay for the government to do exactly that?
Michel Templet
#92. Pacifism as a mass movement aims to avoid suffering; pacifists often say that no cause is worth suffering or dying for. The ethos of Solidarity is based on an opposite premise - that there are causes worth suffering and dying for.
Adam Michnik
#93. If it should happen you wake up and Armageddon has come, lie still.
William Stafford
#94. Why is it acceptable to do such horrible things in the name of staying alive? Would it not have been better had I died with my innocence intact?
Michel Templet
#95. Pacifism is the transitory luxury of a people whose security has been earned by the bravery and militarism of earlier generations.
Bruce Thornton
#96. As long as the peace-makers are armed with assault rifles, it's highly unlikely we'll ever have peace.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#97. My pacifism is not based on any intellectual theory but on a deep antipathy to every form of cruelty and hatred.
Albert Einstein
#98. This side of the Kingdom of God upon Earth, it is a melancholy human fact that those who beat their swords into plowshares end up doing the plowing for those who kept their swords.
Markham Shaw Pyle
#99. I find it significant that most of the people who believe in just war have never fought in one; examples: Barack W. Bush and George H. Obama.
Michel Templet
#100. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.
George Orwell
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