Famous Quotes & Sayings

Howard Zinn

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

Hannah Arendt

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Hannah Arendt

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

Hannah Arendt

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

Hannah Arendt

the insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.

Hannah Arendt

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Hannah Arendt

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

Hannah Arendt

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

Guy de Maupassant

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

George Bernard Shaw

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.

George Bernard Shaw

Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.

George Bernard Shaw

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

George Bernard Shaw

If all the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.

George Bernard Shaw

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

George Bernard Shaw

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Erich Fromm

Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone. To be able to listen to oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.

Erica Jong

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.

We are advancing, we are responding, we are having major apprehensions of the most wanted, most dangerous criminals, overall, we continue to work toward a Mexico of peace that we all want.

Eoin Colfer

I don't suppose you would consider peaceful surrender?

Francois Mitterrand

The problem is that the East is producing missiles and the West is producing pacifists.

Frank Borman

When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?

George J. Mitchell

I believe there's no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended. They're created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings. No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail.

Chris Hedges

War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.

Christiane Amanpour

I believe America will always win the war. It's a superpower that no one can challenge. The real challenge is for the United States to win the peace.

George W. Bush

No, I know all the war rhetoric, but it's all aimed at achieving peace.

George W. Bush

The world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership.

George W. Bush

This is a war between good and evil. And we have made it clear to the world that we will stand strong on the side of good, and we expect other nations to join us. This is not a war between our world and their world. It is a war to save the world.

George W. Bush

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.

George Steiner

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

George Carlin

If everyone in the world sat quietly at the same time, closed their eyes and concentrated as hard as they could on peace and goodwill, all the killing and cruelty in the world would continue. And probably increase.

Garth Brooks

When the skies and the oceans are clean again. Then we shall be free.

Frederick Douglass

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Buechner

. . . [T]o live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it, but . . . to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness.