Desmond Tutu Quotes

The answer to violence is even more democracy, even more humanity...

If we want to reap the harvest of peace and justice in the future, we will have to sow seeds of nonviolence, here and now, in the present.

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.

If you want peace work for justice.

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.

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.

We may win a battle, but if in doing so we have planted thousands of seeds of hatred and fear..the war is not over- only the present conflict has ceased. There will be no peace as long as we react to violence with violence.

Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.

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 not come out of a clash of arms but out of justice lived and done by unarmed nations in the face of odds.

Just as the world cannot live on wars, so people cannot on revolutions

The world is tired of seeing the perpetuation of violence and terrorism, but the effort to create a real peace needs to go hand in hand with the struggle to restore justice.

Militarists say that to gain peace we must prepare for war. I think we get what we prepare for. If we want a world where peace is valued, we must teach ourselves to believe that peace is not a ‘utopian vision’ but a real responsibility that must be worked for each and every day in small and large ways. Any one of us can contribute to building a world where peace and justice prevail.

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

War is not the answer. Violence is not the solution. A more peaceful world is possible.

I will end the history of division and conflict through reconciliation and fairness.

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

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

If you want peace, work for justice.

We are equal in war but not in peace.

… you can have peace at the barrel of a gun, but unless you have peace with justice and self-determination, and allow people to exist in a way where they feel they have had justice done, they can determine their own future, you will never have a just situation, you will never have peace.

This may not be a just peace, but it is more just than the continuation of war.

At the beginning of this century, people never questioned the effectiveness of war, never thought there could be real peace. Now, people are tired of war and see it as ineffective in solving anything.

You can’t have peace without a war.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.