Juan Manuel Santos Quotes

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.

Fighting is not my life.

Democracy wants to win by reason, not by arms or by any other material damage, because, look, I don't have to remind you that I am totally for peace. It is my greatest dream. It was and will remain so.

On my knees, I beg of you to turn away from the paths of violence and to return to the path of peace. Those who resort to violence always claim that only violence brings about change. You must know there is a political, peaceful way to justice.

Peace will come soon to stay, and so come as to be worth keeping in all future time. It will then have proved that among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure their cases and pay the costs.

The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task.

Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.

Waging war we understand, but not waging peace, or at any rate less consciously so.

Human nature being what it is, peace must inevitably be a relative condition. The essence of life is struggle and competition, and to that extent perfect peace is an almost meaningless abstraction. Struggle and competition are stimulating, but when they degenerate into conflict it is usually both destructive and disruptive.

What we need is anger management right now …. The reaction right now is just anger. We tried to get even. But we shouldn’t try to get even—we should try and reconcile.

Fighting lives and dies; you can't fight forever.

You can’t have peace without a war.

A great many people are trying to make peace, but that has already been done. God has not left it for us to do; all we have to do is to enter into it.

The world will continue to change dramatically, but fighting and war can destroy us utterly. What we need now are techniques of harmony, not those of contention. The Art of Peace is required, not the Art of War.

Unless we learn the lesson of nonviolence fully, we shall never do away with the deadly feuds which have been the curse of the Frontier people.

Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

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.

To have peace in the world, men & nations must embrace the nonviolent assertion that ends and means must cohere.

People who talk about peace are very often the most quarrelsome.

Some believe that the only way to remove the authoritarian regime and replace it with a democratic one is through violent means. I would like to set the precedent of political change through political settlement, not through violence.

I believe that peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process.

They won't give peace a chance, that's just a dream some of us had