Quotes About Pacifism
What have people said about pacifism?
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Defense of Pacifism
All that a pacifist can undertake - but it is a very great deal is to refuse to kill,
injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his
life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.
- Vera Brittain
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
- Carl Sandburg
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods
but by finding new words and creating new methods.
- Virginia Woolf
The pacifist is often asked what he would do in the event the United States were to be
conquered by a hostile power. The assumption on the part of the questioner is almost always
that we would simply assume the proper position in which best to have our asses kicked. I
suggest that anyone who believes that such would be the pacifist response to the imposition
in America of an oppressive, authoritarian rule - foreign or domestic - should consult the
prison authorities that were in power when America's prisons were host to some six thousand
pacifists. I am sure it will be found that we have not been forgotten.
- Donald Wetzel, "Pacifist"
Many people know the simple spiritual law that evil can only be overcome by good. Pacifists
not only know it, they also attempt to live it.
- Peace Pilgrim
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
- Thomas Jefferson
We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end
or under any pretense whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world.
- George Fox
True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to an evil power. ...It is rather a courageous
confrontation with evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the
recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the
existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense
of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Non-violence is a power which can be wielded equally by all - children, young men and women
or grown-up people, provided they have a living faith in the God of Love and have therefore
equal love for all mankind. When non-violence is accepted as the law of life it must
pervade the whole being and not be applied to isolated acts.
- Mohandas K. Gandhi
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have
long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe
has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
- Douglas MacArthur
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.
- H.L. Mencken
Critiques of Pacifism
War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
- Mao Zedong
Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.
- Demosthenes
The fact that slaughter [of war] is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more
seriously, but [war does] not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the
name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off
our arms.
- Carl von Clausewitz
To secure peace is to prepare for war.
- Carl von Clausewitz
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war
effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way
of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is
against me'
- George Orwell, writing about pacifists in Britain during 1942
The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a
practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is
why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live - this lost world -
means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.
- Francis Schaeffer
[Pacifists are] the last and least excusable on the list of the enemies of society. They
preach that if you see a man flogging a woman to death you must not hit him. I would much
sooner let a leper come near a little boy than a man who preached such a thing.
- G. K. Chesterton
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of
moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks that nothing is worth war, is much worse. The
person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important
than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free
unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
- John Stuart Mill
Defense of War
[Through war] the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the
stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea
from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in
nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone 'perpetual,' peace.
- GWF Hegel
If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising
prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.
- George Washington
The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.
- General George S. Patton
