Chogyam Trungpa Quotes

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.

Every victory accomplished with weapons is a funeral that should be mourned.

The present war is the saturation point in violence. It spells, to my mind, also its doom.

Continuously, we have to fight to defeat the primitive tendency towards the glorification of arms, the adulation of force, born of the illusion that injustice can be perpetuated by the capacity to kill, or that disputes are necessarily best resolved by resort to violent means.

At the beginning of this century, people never questioned the effectiveness of war, never thought there could be real peace. Now, people are tired of war and see it as ineffective in solving anything.

Our conflict is not likely to cease so soon as every good man would wish. The measure of iniquity is not yet filled; and unless we can return a little more to first principles, and act a little more upon patriotic ground, I do not know when it will-or-what may be the issue of the contest. Speculation-peculation-engrossing-forestalling-with all their concomitants, afford too many melancholy proofs of the decay of public virtue; and too glaring instances of its being the interest and desire of too many, who would wish to be thought friends, to continue the war.

War's Legitimate Object Is More Perfect Peace.

I want that there should be a belief, a faith in the possibility of removing mountains to the side of right. If we believe that war is wrong, as everyone must, then we ought to believe that by proper efforts on our part, it may be done away with.

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

They won't give peace a chance, that's just a dream some of us had

War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.

Many Syrians understand that the only option that exists is the option of peace, which means the option of compromise, .. Nobody can have 100 percent of his desires. He must compromise.

We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace.

Peacemaking calls for courage, much more so than warfare.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

War will exist as long as there's a food chain.

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups or between groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to be run. If you look back, you will see that warfare was an invention, just as ways of handling government or taxes are inventions. You will see, too, that once people use an invention they go on using it until they find another which they think is superior.

It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies.

Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!

He who relies solely on warlike measures shall be exterminated; he who relies solely on peaceful measures shall perish.

We have agreed that peace can be achieved with the removal of the occupation and the end of aggression.

It is much safer to reconcile an enemy than to conquer him; victory may deprive him of his poison, but reconciliation of his will.