Charles Peguy Quotes

Peace is a human right and those who deny you peace are those who are violating an essential right.

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

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

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

We believe that peace is hard-won, That sometimes it is necessary to fight for peace. But more than that, we believe that Justice is more important than peace.

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.

Peace without Justice is a low estate,— A coward cringing to an iron Fate! But Peace through Justice is the great ideal,— We'll pay the price of war to make it real.

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 point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice.

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.

Vice stirs up war, virtue fights.

Peace does not mean just to stop wars, but also to stop oppression and injustice.

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for

I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.

We need to make ourselves deaf to the clamor of the whole world, because war feeds on despotism and is not fought for love of God

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything, I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The Ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more disputes in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

I'm really bothered by questions of humanity, questions of war, questions of slavery.

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

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.

Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.

War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.

Peace, if possible, but justice at any rate.