“Nine-nine of every hundred among you probably desire peace, while the balance may hold war a condition to be preferred; but what can be the mental norm of statesmanship where such a minority conquer the peace-lovers?”— Eden Phillpotts
“We’ll stand before the piles of stones that used to be weapons, and we’ll build an altar.”— Sarah Bessey
“If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man’s life.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.”— Grace Paley
“I decided to start a war, father”, I said, cheerfully, “it’s so much more interesting than peace.”— Bernard Cornwell
“On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war.” She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. “There has never been a war.” In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, “I am a liar.” Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.”— Ursula K. Le Guin
“If water won’t smother the blazeFather, take my tears and bestow them on the firesee if the fires will wither.”— Zakariya Amataya
“There will always be another war, Gillia.” He allowed his cynicism to seep through. “Do you know why? Because there will always be bigots and cowards and power-mad devils in positions of omnipotence. Look around you. There has been war here since time began. It’s nature. Animals kill each other for survival, for territory… and for the taste of blood in their mouths. Man is no different.”— V.S. Carnes
“How goddamn foolish it is, the war. They’s no war in the worth that’s worth fightin’ for. I don’t care where it is. They can’t tell me any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote ’em are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing and so forth. Just think of the poor kids that are starvin’ to death in Asia and so forth that could be fed with how much you make one big shell of. ~Alvin “Tommy” Bridges”— Studs Terkel
“it is a higher glory… to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.”— Augustine of Hippo
“I’ve lived through a war. I’ve seen burning corpses on the road side. And yes, I will tell you, peace is the only way out.”— Thisuri Wanniarachchi
“Peace would always be less compelling than war. Perhaps that was why there was so little of it in the world. (p. 160)”— Eknath Easwaran
“Death and injury caused by armed violence is one of the most shameful epidemics of our age.”— Widad Akreyi
“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
“Shall I tell you why young men love war? . . . In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one question with one right answer. . . . Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.”— Mary Doria Russell
“Man invents war. Man discovers peace. He invents war from without. He discovers peace from within. War man throws. Peace man sows. The smile of war is the flood of human blood. The smile of peace is the love, below, above.”— Sri Chinmoy
“Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?”— Noam Chomsky
“To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.”— Albert Camus
“Peace?’ said Vetinari. ‘Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.”— Terry Pratchett
“There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons.”— Tony Benn