Hilary Mantel Quotes

Their peace and their war Are like wind and storm. War grows from their peace.

What’s so civil about war anyway?

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 for any prolonged period of time is impossible. Humans have a natural thirst for chaos and war is the most readily available form of chaos.

If the time comes when our culture tires of the endless homicidal feuds, despairs of the use of force and war as a means of bringing peace, becomes discontent with the half-lives that its members are living - only then will our culture seriously look for alternatives.

You can’t have peace without a war.

Peace is never a perfect achievement.

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

War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

War is an act of force, and to the application of that force there is no limit. Each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and a reciprocal action results which in theory can have no limit.

Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.

Hobbes: How come we play war and not peace? Calvin: Too few role models.

Let us ask Mary to help us respond to violence, to conflict and to war, with the power of dialogue, reconciliation and love. She is our mother: may she help us to find peace; all of us are her children!

Of course, let us have peace, we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties ... " There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.

Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

Even in waging war, cherish the spirit of peace-maker; that, by conquering those whom you attack, you may lead them back to the advantages of peace.

We say peace and the echo comes back from the other side, war. We dont want wars even when we win.

The present war is the saturation point in violence. It spells, to my mind, also its doom.

I think all of us are agreed that war is probably man's greatest stupidity and I think peace is the dream that lives in the heart of everyone wherever he may be in the world, but unfortunately, unlike a family quarrel, it doesn't take two to make a war. It only takes one, unless the other one is prepared to surrender at the first hint of force.

They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak they create the seeds of turmoil and violence.

Now I see Peace to corrupt no less than war to waste.

Real peace is more than the absence of war; it is an absence of the causes of war.