Bayard Rustin Quotes

I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.

Any soldier worth his salt should be antiwar. And still there are things worth fighting for.

I come from a family of pacifists, so it's not like I was going to join the war. Sweden is not like the States or England where you might get sent to Afghanistan next month.

I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.

It is often pacifists who, halting and stumbling and not knowing whither they are going, finally drift helplessly into a war.

My voice is still [i.e. silent] for war.

I am prepared to die but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.

I hold that all war is morally wrong and its prosecution a crime. I hold life as sacred and cannot bring myself to join in the slaughter of my fellow men.

Religious pacifists were confined in unsanitary guardhouses—sometimes in unheated cells during winter months, without blankets …. Men were … beaten, pricked or stabbed with bayonets, jerked about with ropes around their necks, threatened with summary execution, tortured by various forms of the “water cure.”

May no young man ever be faced with the choice between violating his conscience by cooperating in competitive mass slaughter or separating himself from those who, endeavoring to save liberty, democracy, humanity, can find no better way to conscript young men to kill.

The Bible nowhere prohibits war. In the Old Testament we find war and even conquest positively commanded, and although war was raging in the time of Christ and His apostles, still they said not a word of its unlawfulness and immorality.

There is now all this patriotic indignation about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Japanese expansionism in Asia. Yet not a word about American and European expansionism in the same area.... We must make a start. We must renounce war as an instrument of policy.... Even as I speak to you I may be guilty of what some men call treason.... You young men should refuse to take up arms. Young women tear down the patriotic posters. And all of you — young and old — put away your flags.

Being a pacifist means that you do not seek a fight, that you use every means in your power to prevent a fight …. but if war comes into your own country, then even a pacifist it seems to me, must stand up and fight for their beliefs.

It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons and serve in wars.

No government really rooted in parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong …

I succeeded in staying out of the military during the Vietnam War, and I would never assume the right to tell others to do a “duty” that I shirked.

Islam—like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion—is not about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about absolute belief in its own superiority and the divine right to impose its version of truth upon others.

The people, ever greedy for war, till they suffer by it …

If your sons must be torn from you by conscription, consign them to the care of God; but let there be no volunteers except for defensive war.

The right to control their own government according to constitutional forms is not one of the rights that the citizens of this country are called upon to surrender in time of war.

I am against war, and because I am against war I went to war to fight against war.

Nor can any man that is conscientiously scrupulous of bearing arms in any case be justly compelled thereto if he will pay such equivalent.

Religious freedom must include the right to influence public policy within the bounds of liberal norms.

Bahais are not pacifists since we uphold the use of force in the service of justice and upholding law. But we do not believe that war is ever necessary and its abolition is one of the essential purposes and brightest promises of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation.

There's a very heavy burden of proof to be borne by anyone who calls for violence. Maybe it can be sometimes justified. Personally, I'm not a committed pacifist, so I think that, yes, it can sometimes be justified.