Betty Williams Quotes

Women don't go to war to kill other women. Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.

If I look at history, it seems that most wars and most cruel things have been done by men and not by women.

The impression is given that this and other countries are at war with one another. They are not. Their governments, composed of men and responsible only to the men of each country, and backed by the majority of men who have caught the war and glory fever, have declared war on one another. The women of all these countries have not been consulted as to whether they would have war or not. If men deliberately shut out women, the peace-loving sex, from their rightful share in ruling their countries, then all the appeals and sentiments and prayers will be of no avail in preventing hostilities.

All patriarchal societies are either preparing for war, at war, or recovering from war.

Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy's answer to conflicts and social problems. Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war.

War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.

By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented.

We like to think of women as peacemakers, not purveyors of violence.

I can't rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature.

Perhaps a reign of powerful women is necessary to make, or unmake when need be, powerful men. Women would not waste so readily and uselessly the lives they had such care and pain in bearing. Why should they submit to the massacre of the innocent, one generation after another ... and allow them to be brought up as live-stock for the inevitable killing?

When women have reclaimed their voices and men reclaimed their hearts, we won't be invading countries, we won't be feeling that we have the right to launch preemptive wars.

Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.

Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people attack other people and I think a legitimate rationale for war is the saving of human life, the saving of lives of people who cannot defend themselves.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

We make war that we may live in peace.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

Women... can't live with 'em... can't shoot 'em.

A lot of women - not all of them, a lot of them - feel insecure about men being men.

Now, I believe that war is never inevitable until it starts, but there has been a great proclivity in human history, and including in recent history, for war.

I think that war is diplomacy by other means, for sure, and there have been wars that have been fought for righteous reasons. There are wars that have had to be fought, and there will probably continue to be.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

War, I thought, was the most negative aspect of male heterosexuality. If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men.

It is said that a hundred gamecocks will live in perfect harmony together it you do not put a hen with them; and so it would have been with Billy and Bob, had there been no women in the world.