Dalai Lama Quotes

Man has an innate capacity for violence, but can only justify it in the name of justice.

I feel like war should occur only for the most vital and necessary reasons, and only then.

I'm not gonna shoot anyone with the pellet gun... Not unless I have to!

When a soldier goes to war he has to have a moral justification for killing the other side.

Never unsheathe the sword except in self defense.

God is my judge. We were justified under the circumstances.

You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning

I was only following orders," the Mayor mocks. "The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time.

We are fully justified in valuing the life and person of an intended victim more highly than the life of a pernicious assailant. The attacker must be stopped. At once and completely.

Sometimes you have to do what’s wrong in order to do what’s right.

I could justify violence only in this extreme case, to save the last living knowledge of Buddhism itself.

The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some *******s in the world that just need to be shot. There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.

If our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.

Pure motives can never justify impure or violent action.

I am not a criminal, for I destroyed a bad man. I thought I was right.

To hope for safety in flight, when you have turned away from the enemy the arms by which the body is defended, is indeed madness. In battle those who are most afraid are always in most danger; but courage is equivalent to rampart.

It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.

Let us be terrible in order to prevent the people from being terrible themselves!

They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

But in that backroom or whatever it is when God confronts me with my sins, I do not believe any of the kills I had during the war will be among them. Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on every shot. They all deserved to die.

Perhaps a man may commit suicide in self-defense.

Here you are, you're a liberal, probably define peace as the absence of conflict. I define peace as the ability to defend yourself and blow your enemies into smithereens.

People continued regardless of all that leads man forward to try to unite the incompatibles:;: the virtue of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to torture but even to kill one another.

An honest man is not accountable for the vice and folly of his trade, and therefore ought not to refuse the exercise of it. It is the custom of his country, and there is profit in it. We must live by the world, and such as we find it, so make use of it.