Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mao Zedong

We desire peace. However, if imperialism insists on fighting a war, we will have no alternative but to take the firm resolution to fight to the finish before going ahead with our construction. If you are afraid of war day in day out, what will you do if war eventually comes? First, I said that the East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind and war will not break out, and now I have added these explanations about the situation in case war should break out. Both possibilities have thus been taken into account.

Mao Zedong

Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power.

Mao Zedong

The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory.

Madeleine L'Engle

We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need defending.

John Gay

Breathe soft, ye winds! ye waves, in silence sleep!

John F. Kennedy

[War] can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.

John F. Kennedy

But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete." (John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963, American University speech)

John F. Kennedy

And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights -- the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation – the right to breathe air as nature provided it -- the right of future generations to a healthy existence?" (John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963, American University speech)

John F. Kennedy

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required - not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

John F. Kennedy

The mere absence of war is not peace.

John F. Kennedy

Aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.

John F. Kennedy

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war... But we have no more urgent task.

John F. Kennedy

So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.

John F. Kennedy

Never have the nations of the world had so much to lose, or so much to gain. Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames.

John F. Kennedy

I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

John F. Kennedy

Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as be wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

John F. Kennedy

For if Freedom and Communism were to compete for mans allegiance in a world at peace, I would look to the future with ever increasing confidence.

John F. Kennedy

It takes two to make peace.

Linus Pauling

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.

Linda Howard

Death isn't peaceful; it is just nothing. Everything is gone. No more sunrises, no more hopes, no more fears. Nothing.

Linda Chavez

We have created not a Brave New World, but a vulgar marketplace, where human attributes come with a price tag.

Leo Tolstoy

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

Leo Tolstoy

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

Leo Tolstoy

The law of violence is not a law, but a simple fact which can only be a law when it does not meet with protest and opposition. It is like the cold, darkness and weight, which people had to put up with until recently when warmth, illumination and leverage were discovered....

Leo Tolstoy

Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?

Leo Tolstoy

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.

Leo Tolstoy

If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.

Leo Tolstoy

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

Leo Tolstoy

Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy

Leo Tolstoy

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.

Leo Tolstoy

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

Leo Tolstoy

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

Leo Tolstoy

A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.