Peacemaking Quotes

There is no path to peace; peace is the path.

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

If we are not happy, if we are not peaceful, we cannot share peace and happiness with others, even those we love, those who live under the same roof. If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

There can be no peace without law.

Without being peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help other people to smile. If we are not peaceful, then we cannot contribute to the peace movement.

Grow a garden, give food away, resist the temptation to give into hate, change it up and try peacemaking for once, love your neighbor, love your enemy.

War is what happens when language fails.

I know that in embarking on non-violence I shall be running what might be termed a mad risk. But the victories of truth have never been won without risks.

My life has been devoted to peacemaking.

Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking.

When engaged in safe occupations, and living in healthy countries, men are much more apt to be frugal, than in unhealthy, or hazardous occupations, and in climates pernicious to human life. Sailors and soldiers are prodigals. . . . War and pestilence have always waste and luxury, among the other evils that follow in their train.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.

Blessed are the peacemakers, and one sure way of peacemaking is to let the fire of contention alone. Neither fan it, nor stir it, nor add fuel to it, but let it go out by itself. Begin your ministry with one blind eye and one deaf ear.

Anyone can love peace, but Jesus didn't say, "Blessed are the peace-lovers." He says �peacemakers.� He is referring to a life vocation, not a hobby on the sidelines of life.

Dream always of a peaceful, warless, disarmed world.

Peace, to have meaning for many who have only known suffering in both peace and war, must be translated into bread or rice, shelter, health and education, as well as freedom and human dignity.

There is no time left for anything but to make peace work a dimension of our every waking activity.

The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man or one party or one nation. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.

Looking for peace is like looking for a turtle with a mustache: You won't be able to find it. But when your heart is ready, peace will come looking for you.

Peace comes from being able to contribute the best that we have, and all that we are, toward creating a world that supports everyone. But it is also securing the space for others to contibute the best that they have and all that they are.

There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with children.

All works of love are works of peace.

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

When the real history of mankind is fully disclosed, will it feature the echoes of gunfire or the shaping sound of lullabies? The great armistices made by military men or the peacemaking of women in homes and in neighborhoods? Will what happened in cradles and kitchens prove to be more controlling than what happened in congresses? When the surf of the centuries has made the great pyramids so much sand, the everlasting family will still be standing, because it is a celestial institution, formed outside telestial time.

The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice-and so the pain-of the cross.

Feelings of guilt dominate our work as peacemakers we cannot last long. But when we have opened each other's eyes to the great human gifts among all people we can indeed make peacemaking a way of being.

The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.

War is the father of all things.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

War...is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.

I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.

Without any coherent international blueprint the White House has bombed its way around the globe, while dropping troops far and wide for ill-defined peacemaking duties. This policy has gutted the American military which now must be rebuilt.

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.

The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.

We should consider the possibility that many, and perhaps even all of Jesus' hell-fire or end-of-the-universe statements refer not to postmortem [after death] judgment but to the very historic consequences of rejecting his kingdom message of reconciliation and peacemaking. The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 67-70 seems to many people to fulfill much of what we have traditionally understood as hell.

While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Nothing is more precious than peace. Peace is the most basic starting point for the advancement of humankind.

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

It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

You can't shake hands with a closed fist.

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind. In this sense the most insignificant writer can serve peace, where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done.

Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars...The stakes are immense, the task colossal the time is short. But we may hope- we must hope- that man's own creation, man's own genius, will not destroy him.

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.