Theodore Parker Quotes

When every young man refuses to go to war, you will have peace. You do not defend any idea with violence.

If the fight comes unsolicited, I am not willing to die meekly, to surrender without an effort. And that being so, am I still a pacifist?

War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.

It is claimed for satyagraha that it is a complete substitute for violence or war.

Jesus was a pacifist.

I am totally against the war but violence is part of mankind and it's going to happen, but as musicians I think we've got to step up and say 'come on'.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.

Through Gandhi and my own life experience, I have learned about nonviolence. I believe that human life is a very special gift from God, and that no one has a right to take that away in any cause, however just. I am convinced that nonviolence is more powerful than violence.

The root of war is fear.

I'm not a pacifist. I'm not that brave.

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.

It is better to have a war for justice than peace in injustice.

I believe all war to be wholly wrong.

We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.

The measure of civilization in a people is to be found in its just appreciation of the wrongfulness of war.

The term 'just war' is an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.

Nonviolent non-co-operation with evil means co-operation with all that is good.

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

I can think about what [Mahatma] Gandhi said or [Martin Luther] King said about violence begetting violence, and still be true to my job by asking myself the question whenever we're confronted with a situation where some may be arguing for military action: Will this actually result in America being safer, or the most lives being saved?

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.

Let us make war on the phrase 'violence doesn't solve anything.' It is a lie, and anyone who utters it cannot be taken morally seriously.

History has no record of a nation having adopted nonviolent resistance.

Nonviolence in the sense of mere non-killing does not appear to me, therefore, to be of any improvement on the technique of violence.

I came to the conclusion that war was an unacceptable way of solving whatever problems there were in the world--that there would be problems of tyranny, of injustice, of nations crossing frontiers and that injustice and tyranny should not be tolerated and should be fought and resisted, but the one thing that must not be used to solve that problem is war. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. And that fact overwhelms whatever moral cause is somewhere buried in the history of that war.