"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1948

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
- John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)

"It's not my victory, it's yours and yours and yours. If
a gay can win, it means there is hope that the system can work for all minorities if we fight. We've given them hope."
- Harvey Milk 1930-1978

"Our country, right or wrong.
When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right"

- Carl Schurz, revolutionary, statesman and reformer (1829-1906)


“You shoot at men who are fathers: war is completely stupid.”
- Lazare Ponticelli, France's last surviving World War I veteran reflecting on his experience of war shortly before his death. He was 110.

"There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that
quite matches a vague enemy who can be used to whip up fear
and hatred among the population."

- Paul Rusesabagina, humanitarian

"The first man to raise a fist is the one who has run out of ideas."
-
source unknown

"Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war."
- Otto von Bismarck

"The way to war is a well-paved highway and the way to peace is still a wilderness."
- Paul P. Harris

" This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love."

- Martin Luther King

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- attributed to Benjamin Franklin

"Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization.
We must make our choice; we cannot have both."

- Abraham Flexner

"I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask,
'Mother, what was war?'"
- Eve Merriam

" Sit up, join up, get on line, get in touch, find out who's raising hell and join them. No use waiting on a bunch of wussy politicians."

- Molly Ivins

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
- James Madison

“In time of war, the loudest patriots are the greatest profiteers.”
- August Bebel, 1870

"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

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame

of killing innocent people."
– Howard Zinn

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars

for young men to die in."
– George McGovern

"During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable,

even though it has to masquerade often

under the guise of patriotism."

- Howard Thurman (theologian)

"War should be made a crime, and those who instigate

it should be punished as criminals."
– Charles Evans Hughes

"War cannot be humanized, only abolished"

- Albert Einstein

"Poverty is the worst form of violence."

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."
- Albert Einstein

"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to
shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds

to bury the dead."
-
Arundhati Roy

"What does it matter to the dead, the orphans,
and the homeless whether the mad destruction
is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or
the holy name of liberty or democracy?"

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Children learn more from what you are than what you teach."
-
W.E.B. Dubois, 1897

"Nonviolence doesn't always work-but violence never does"
- Madge Micheels-Cyrus

"It's always the old who lead us to the war,
It's always the young who fall,
Now look at all we've won
With the sabre and the gun,
Tell me is it worth it at all."
- Phil Ochs

"It takes better intelligence to prevent wars than it does to start them." - Kenneth H. Landay

"Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent."
-
Issac Asimov

"...when we fill our souls up with creativity, artistry and intelligence, things of that nature, we have a better chance at avoiding the behavior that leads to destruction."

- Rick DellaRatta - Founder, Jazz for Peace

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate.

And I can picture us attacking that world,
because they'd never expect it."
- Jack Handy, Deep Thoughts

"The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Either war is obsolete or men are."
- R. Buckminster Fuller

"There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders."
- Ralph Bunche

"War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men."
- Georges Clemenceau

"So long as there are men there will be wars."
- Albert Einstein

"War would end if the dead could return."
- Stanley Baldwin

"The belief in the inevitability of war is a self-fulfilling prophecy...

We need an alternative vision, to see the world as one,

as interconnected."
- Dennis J. Kucinich

"Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those

who love war."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"How wonderful it is that no one need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
-
Anne Frank

"It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social change is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the silence of the so-called good people. "
-
Martin Luther King

"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."

- Bertrand Russell

"The only thing worth globalizing is dissent."
-
Arundhati Roy

"I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower


Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals."
-
Ammon Hennacy

"The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organization of violence."
- Joan Baez

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."
-
Jimi Hendrix

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
-
Hannah Arendt

"Democracies die behind closed doors."
- Judge Damon J. Keith, Federal Court of Appeals

"I'm not disturbing the peace. I'm disturbing the war."
- Ammon Hennacy

"The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?"
-
Pablo Casals

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
- John F. Kennedy, 20th anniversary of the Voice of America, 2/26/62

"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953


“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
- Salvor Hardin


“ I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

- John Lennon

"Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of mankind."
- Albert Einstein

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
-
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does."
- Margaret Mead

"Those who are willing to forfeit liberty for security will have neither."

- Benjamin Franklin

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to defeat for it is only momentary."
-
Mohandas Gandhi, 1919

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed".
-
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."

- Bertrand Russell

"Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."
-
Charlie Chaplin

"Making peace, I have found, is much harder than making war."
- Gerry Adams

"War is at best barbarism."
-
William Tecumseh Sherman

"I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world."
-
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"War is Over! If You Want It."
-
John Lennon and Yoko Ono

"All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood to do the fighting for them."

- Emma Goldman, 1917

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
-
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967

"My pacifism is not based on any intellectual theory but on a deep antipathy to every form of cruelty and hatred."
-
Albert Einstein

"If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?"
-
Joan Baez

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

"All we are saying...is give peace a chance."
-
John Lennon

"An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
- Mohandas Gandhi

"The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."
- Carl Sandburg


"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."
- Jeannette Rankin

"Either war is obsolete or men are."
- R. Buckminster Fuller

"There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders."
- Ralph Bunche

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or
that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"War is not the answer for only love can conquer hate."
-
Marvin Gaye

"Nonviolence, pacifism, that's the greatest thing that I think the human species has to aspire to, because otherwise it's not going to be around."
-
Martin Scorsese

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing that it seeks to destroy."
- Martin Luther King, Jr

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
- Mohandas Gandhi

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illustration Nancy Brigham


An Immoral Story
Tim O'Brien


A true war story is never moral. It does not
instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest
models of proper human behavior, nor restrain
men from doing things men have always done.
If a war story seems moral, do not believe it. If
at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if
you feel that some small bit of rectitude has
been salvaged from the larger waste, then you
have been made the victim of a very old and
terrible lie
.

The
Ecology Symbol


turned 40
read about the design and history of this symbol


 


 

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