Famous Quotes & Sayings

George Orwell

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

George Orwell

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

G. Gordon Liddy

The soldiers currently manning our sophisticated weaponry have room temperature IQ's.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.

Friedrich Nietzsche

He who does not desire much more from things than knowledge of them easily makes peace with his soul.

Jeannette Rankin

I worked for suffrage for years, and got it. I've worked for peace for 55 years and haven't come close.

Jeannette Rankin

You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go.

Jeannette Rankin

What one decides to do in crisis depends on one's philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn't any philosophy in crises, others make the decision.

Jeannette Rankin

There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense; for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

Jeannette Rankin

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

George Eliot

I couldn't live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God.

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.

George Eliot

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

Fernando Pessoa

There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness

Felix Adler

Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

My life has been devoted to peacemaking.

Ezra Pound

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Ezra Taft Benson

I began to realize that when you are at peace with your Maker you can, if not ignore human criticism, at least rise above it.

Francis of Assisi

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.

Jean Vanier

Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work -- hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss -- loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.