John Boyle O'Reilly Quotes

Without armaments peace cannot be kept; wars are waged not only to repel injustice but also to establish a firm peace.

It would be naïve to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems ... However, with faith and perseverance, ... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace.

Let me just say: Peace to you, if you're willing to fight for it.

I fought for peace in the fifties.

We can't allow any war for imperialism or greed to be fought in our names. This is what we need to keep fighting for.

Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?

We love peace, but not peace at any price.

To Perpetual Peace

Peace with justice is very difficult. My people need both, but we need peace more.

It is easier to obstruct peace than it is to promote it.

Confidence alone does not make peace, but acknowledging rights and confidence do. Failure to recognize these rights creates a sense of injustice; it keeps the embers burning under the ashes.

Only by addressing the root causes of conflict and disputes can we hope to find lasting peace in a just and equitable world.

We have learned that change cannot come through war. War is not a feasible tool to use in fighting against the oppression we face. War has caused more problems. We cannot embrace that path.

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

Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.

Peace, if possible, but justice at any rate.

All of us realize that war requires action. What is sometimes harder for us to realize is that peace and neutrality also require action.

Sometimes you must live in a violent world in order to get greater justice.

Present day statesmen are making the biggest blunder of the age if they believe that there can be any peace without equity and justice to all mankind.

Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.

Christ said: Blessed are the peace-makers, not blessed are the peace-sayers. If the world fell into the hands of totalitarian factions, there is still the possibility that they might fight amongst themselves. Surrender to them would not encourage the kingdom of peace and love - and those that desire it, or with passionate intensity permit it, know not what they do.

The peace we seek and need means much more than mere absence of war. It means the acceptance of law, and the fostering of justice, in all the world.

Just as the world cannot live on wars, so people cannot on revolutions

Militarists say that to gain peace we must prepare for war. I think we get what we prepare for. If we want a world where peace is valued, we must teach ourselves to believe that peace is not a ‘utopian vision’ but a real responsibility that must be worked for each and every day in small and large ways. Any one of us can contribute to building a world where peace and justice prevail.

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.