Ellar Coltrane Quotes

The sad fact is that horrendous human conflict is nothing new.

Aren't you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?

Nonviolence is the only way. Even if you achieve your goal by violent means there are always side effects, and these can be worse than the problem. Violence is against human nature.

War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.

Violence diminishes our humanity.

I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.

No war ought ever to be undertaken but under circumstances which render all intercourse of courtesy between the combatants impossible. It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another's throats without hatred. War is never lenient but where it is wanton; when men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge: this may be bad; but it is human nature.

Why do people want to kill and maim and pillage? We're all in it together.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

War was forced upon mankind in his original civil and social condition.

Atrocities are human nature - they don't have political beliefs, color, creed or anything like that. They just happen, it's human.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother... We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

Fighting is not a man's thing, it is a human thing.

War is the greatest failure of mankind.

I am a peace man except when I wish to fight.

We are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.

Wars are often the cause of further wars because they fuel deep hatreds, create situations of injustice, and trample upon people's dignity and rights. Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore, in addition to causing horrendous damage, they prove ultimately futile. War is a defeat for humanity. Only in peace and through peace can respect for human dignity and its inalienable rights be guaranteed... .

The belief that war is inevitable makes of war a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful.

What is the matter with these people, these people who won't stop fighting, won't stop hurting each other...?

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.

Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.