"We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal right of men and women and of nations large and small....And for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors...have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims."

Preamble, Charter of the United Nations.

"One cannot simultaneously prepare for war and create peace."

Anon

"We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."

Thomas A. Kempis

"Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort which might have saved the world."

Jane Addams

"If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon. If you and your friends do not despise the small work, a million people will remove a lot of suffering. That is the secret. Start right now."

Sister Chän Khöng

"The essence of nonviolence is love. Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies, tactics, and techniques for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally. Nonviolence is not a dogma; it is a process."

Thich Nhat Hanh

"Generally speaking, the first nonviolent act is not fasting, but dialogue. The other side, the adversary, is recognized as a person, he is taken out of his anonymity and exists in his own right, for what he really is, a person. To engage someone in dialogue is to recognize him, have faith in him. At every step in the nonviolent struggle, at every level we try tirelessly to establish a dialogue, or reestablish it if it has broken down. When I say 'the other side,' that could be a group of persons or a government."

Hildegard Goos-Mayr

"All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life."

Jean Goss

"All who affirm the use of violence admit it is only a means to achieve justice and peace. But peace and justice are nonviolence...the final end of history. Those who abandon nonviolence have no sense of history. Rathy they are bypassing history, freezing history, betraying history."

André Trocmé

"Laws and conditions that tend to debase human personality - a God-given force - be they brought by the State or individuals, must be relentlessly opposed in the spirit of defiance shown by St. Peter when he said to the rulers of his day: 'Shall we obey God or man?'"

Albert Luthuli

"We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving, and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change as those around us can change too.

Maíread Maguire

"We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments."

Abraham Heshel

"The Holy Prophet Mohammed came into this world and taught us: 'That man is a Muslim who never hurts anyone by word or deed, but who works for the benefit and happiness of God's creatures. Belief in God is to love one's fellow men.'"

Abdul Ghaffar Khan

"Whether humanity will consciously follow the law of love, I do not know. But that need not disturb me. The law will work just as the law of gravitation works, whether we accept it or not. The person who discovered the law of love was a far greater scientist than any of our modern scientists. Only our explorations have not gone far enough and so it is not possible for everyone to see all its workings."

Mahatma Gandhi

In the secret of my heart I am in perpetual quarrel with God that He should allow such things [as the war] to go on. My non-violence seems almost impotent. But the answer comes at the end of the daily quarrel that neither God nor non-violence is impotent. Impotence is in men. I must try on without losing faith even though I may break in the attempt.

Mahatma Gandhi

Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.

Mahatma Gandhi

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as "love." "Love" is an abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing tolife, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self increasing. from To Have or to Be?

Erich Fromm

"One of the most persistent ambiguities that we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal. However, it does not take sharpest-eyed sophistication to discern that while everbody talks about peace, peace has become practically nobodys' business among the power-wielders. Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace."

Martin Luther King,Jr.

"The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites - acquiescence and violence - while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both. The nonviolent resister agress with the person who acquisces that one should not be physically agressive toward his opponent; but he balances the equation by agreeing with the person of violence that evil must be resisted. He avoids the nonresistance of the former and the violent resistance of the latter. With nonviolent resistance, no invidual or group need to submit to any wrong, nor need anyone resort to violence in order to right a wrong." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. he lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk". Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The way of peace is the way of love. Love is the greatest power on earth. It conquers all things."
-- Peace Pilgrim

"This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love."
-- Peace Pilgrim.

"At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events'; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. in solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second."

Leo Tolstoy War & Peace

"When women have a voice in national and international affairs, wars will cease forever."

Augusta Stowe-Gullen

"How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy."

Nietzsche

"I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier. In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you...because no one has the right to take the life of another human being."

Joan Baez

"War makes good history but peace is poor reading."

Thomas Hardy

"There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."
-- A.J. Muste.

"The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"We should take care, in inculcating patriotism into our boys and girls, that is a patriotism above the narrow sentiment which usually stops at one's country, and thus inspires jealousy and enmity in dealing with others... Our patriotism should be of the wider, nobler kind which recognises justice and reasonableness in the claims of others and which lead our country into comradeship with...the other nations of the world. The first step to this end is to develop peace and goodwill within our borders, by training our youth of both sexes to its practice as their habit of life, so that the jealousies of town against town, class against class and sect against sect no longer exist; and then to extend this good feeling beyond our frontiers towards our neighbours."

Lord Baden-Powell

"Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous"
-- George Bernard Shaw

"More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars -- yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt.

" Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."

Duke Of Wellington 1759-1852

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it"

George Orwell

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime"

Ernest Hemingway

"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it."

Sterling Price

"I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war."
-- Cicero.

"If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another."
-- Winston Churchill

"In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons." - Herodotus

"War would end if the dead could return." Stanley Baldwin

"There was never a good war or a bad peace." Benjamin Franklin

"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

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

Because we all share this planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. That is not just a dream, but a necessity. We are dependent on each other in so many ways that we can no longer live in isolated communities and ignore what is happening outside those communities.

Dalai Lama

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.
–The 14th Dalai Lama

If we looked down at the world from space, we would not see any demarcations of national boundaries. We would simply see one small planet, just one.

Dalai Lama

The antidote to hatred in the heart, the source of violence, is tolerance. Tolerance is an important virtue of bodhisattvas–it enables you to refrain from reacting angrily to the harm inflicted on you by others. You could call this practice “inner disarmament,” in that a well-developed tolerance makes you free from the compulsion to counterattack. For the same reason, we also call tolerance the “best armor,” since it protects you from being conquered by hatred itself.

Dalai Lama

Internal peace is an essential first step to achieving peace in the world. How do you cultivate it? It’s very simple. In the first place by realizing clearly that all mankind is one, that human beings in every country are members of one and the same family.

Dalai Lama

It is worth reminding ourselves that what brings us the greatest joy and satisfaction in life are those actions we undertake out of concern for others. Indeed we can go further. For whereas the fundamental questions of human existence, such as why we are here, where we are going, and whether the universe had a beginning, have each elicited different responses in different philosophical traditions, it is self-evident that a generous heart and wholesome actions lead to greater peace.

Dalai Lama

All forms of violence, especially war, are totally unacceptable as means to settle disputes between and among nations, groups and persons.

Dalai Lama

Has there ever been a time when the world was not in turmoil? There are no Good Old Days. All we have is the present moment, in which to change ourselves.

Dalai Lama

Nonviolence does not mean that we remain indifferent to a problem. On the contrary, it is important to be fully engaged. However, we must behave in a way that does not benefit us alone. We must not harm the interests of others. Nonviolence therefore is not merely the absence of violence. It involves a sense of compassion and caring. It is almost a manifestation of compassion.

Dalai Lama

If you want to know what an ultimate goal would be, of course it would be utter peace.
David Miscavige

If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.
Anthony De Mello

So if people do what they know to be good, the knowledge of good is enough in the world for them to be really happy and really peaceful and really remarkably friendly and supportive to everyone.
Maharishi Mahesh

What I believe, according to my own experience, is that a calm, peaceful mind is a very important element for sustaining the body in a balanced way.
Dalai Lama

Through awareness, you get a certain attitude. That's the way, you see, to achieve more peaceful, more compassion, more friendship through that way.
Dalai Lama

But Islam does not call for that, it is a faith of peace.
Aga Khan IV

It is beautiful to acquire knowledge, but it is misleading to expect it to bring us peace, love and happiness.
Ken Keyes, Jr

I am devoted to total world peace. I am the world.
Byron Katie

I went with a heavy heart not knowing what to expect, but convinced that I must go for the reconciliation of my people and peace.
Kim Dae-jung

Those who seek to become immortals must regard loyalty, filiality, peacefulness, obedience, benevolence and trustworthiness as fundamental.
Ge Hong

But maybe, by raising my voice, I can help the greatest of all causes - good will among men and peace on earth.
Albert Einstein

We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.

Albert Einstein

It's going to take your generation too, to build a world a nonviolent world

Maired Corrigan

We want to disarm human hearts and human beings, one by one, country by country.

Mairead Corrigan

I think as you meditate over the years you evolve--your practice gets deeper, and you reach new levels of inner peace and awareness.

Jack Canfield

It is in that inner peace and stillness that things begin to happen, and it
was in that peace and stillness that I began to hear God's voice.

Eileen Caddy

Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of goodwill.

Yasser Arafat

We want the peace of the brave for our children and for their children, for a bright future where they can live and learn.

Yasser Arafat