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I received "The Little Book of Peace" (edited by Patricia Chui) in my Christmas stocking this year and got around to reading it this week. The book came out soon after the September 11 attacks and contains hundreds of quotes. I'm sure many have seen it or read it. I just went through and picked out some good ones -- feel free to add on with some favorites of your own...
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist (Indira Gandhi)
Forego your anger for a moment and save yourself 100 days of trouble (Chinese proverb)
Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces (Henry David Thoreau)
You can't hold a man down without staying down with him (Booker T. Washington)
Those who prefer victory to peace will have neither (Anonymous)
There is nothing that war has ever achieved we could not achieve better without it (Havelock Ellis)
Warmaking doesn't stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have ended millennia ago (Colman McCarthy)
Terrorism is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it. War is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it. (Sydney Harris, 1986)
There is no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war, except its ending. (Abraham Lincoln)
Whoever fights monsters should see to it than in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters (African proverb)
Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him? (Blaise Pascal, 1670)
What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars (Mikhail Gorbachev)
Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals (Ammon Hennacy)
The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war (Hyman Rickover)
I'm not a pacifist. I'm not that brave (Phil Donahue)
The god of victory is said to be one-handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
and finally...
Pacificism is simply undisguised cowardice (Adolf Hitler)
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