Barack Obama Quotes

We go to war only to make peace. We never went to war with any other design. We carry the national conscience wherever we go.

Whenever you have a possibility of going in two ways, either for peace or for war, for peaceful methods of for military methods, in the present age there is a strong prejudice for the peaceful ones. War seldom ever leads to good results.

So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.

I think anything is better than war. The extent to which one can negotiate with fanatics, I have no idea. I don't know.

We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else's.

War's Legitimate Object Is More Perfect Peace.

I have been apt to think that there has never been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

We want peace with all our hearts. But peace cannot be achieved through weakness.

We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.

One of the most basic principles for making and keeping peace within and between nations. . . is that in political, military, moral, and spiritual confrontations, there should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat

We need political leadership that will move the world away from war into solving its problems through dialogue and negotiation, to build friendship with people, which is not what we've had with this war on terror.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Peace is not sought in order to provoke war, but war is waged in order to attain peace.

Arms alone are not enough to keep the peace. It must be kept by men.

The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.

All States do not have the same interests, but are there any interests which cannot be infinitely better reconciled before than after a war?

We know from our own history, and that of our neighbors, that where conflicts and disagreements are not resolved peacefully, the suffering and bloodshed that follows and the collapse of economic and social development leads to tragic consequences.

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.

Peace, like war, can succeed only where there is a will to enforce it, and where there is available power to enforce it.

The quest for peace is the statesman's most exacting duty... Practical progress to lasting peace is his fondest hope.

Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable.

Peace is the alternative to war, and nonviolence should be seen as the antidote to violence, not simply as its opposite. Nonviolence is more concerned with saving life than with saving face.

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