Quotes on No War

I am a man of peace. I believe in peace. But I do not want peace at any price.

Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually genuinely desiring peace. War is the outcome, not mainly of evil intentions, but on the whole of good intentions which miscarry or are frustrated. It is made not usually by evil men knowing themselves to be wrong, but is the outcome of policies pursued by good men usually passionately convinced that they are right.

In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.

I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.

Laws are silent in time of war.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders.

It is utterly and irrevocably possible to empty all hurts and therefore to love, to have compassion. To have compassion means to have passion for all things, not just between two people, but for all human beings, for all things of the earth, the animals, the trees - everything the earth contains. When we have such compassion we will not despoil the earth as we are doing now and we will have no wars.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be even a worse fate, you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

War can be avoided, and it ought to be avoided. I want no war.

There is no holy life. There is no war between good and evil. There is no sin and no redemption. None of these things matter to the real you. But they all matter hugely to the false you, the one who believes in the separate self. You have tried to take your separate self, with all its loneliness and anxiety and pride, to the door of enlightenment. But it will never go through, because it is a ghost.

There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.