Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

A war is only as good as the peace that follows.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.

War settles nothing.

The best way to solve problems and to fight against war is through dialogue.

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

The thing that really gets to me is that countries are in the news only when things get out of hand. That's when it's newsworthy. When the war ends, it's not newsworthy anymore; no one wants to think about it. Actually, the aftermath is the most important part. It's when people have to rebuild.

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

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

All the aftermath that so frequently follows in the wake of war still confront the nation, and we now, as ever before, must hold fast to the ancient landmarks and see to it that all of these plagues that threaten so mightily shall be rendered harmless.

In this age there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war. We must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint.

Peacemaking and peacekeeping should run in parallel.

It is not our business to collect trophies but to try … [to] bring back the world to peaceful habits

No man should think that peace comes easily. Peace does not come by merely wanting it, or shouting for it, or marching down Main Street for it. Peace is built brick by brick, mortared by the stubborn effort and the total energy and imagination of able and dedicated men. And it is built in the living faith that, in the end, man can and will master his own destiny.

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.

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.

We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.

War would end if the dead could return.

Number one, that it is smart to communicate and negotiate with your enemy instead of just waging war with bombs and weapons of mass destruction.

Peace is a question of will. All conflicts can be settled, and there are no excuses for allowing them to become eternal.

War is never a lasting solution for any problem.

I was part of a government that tried to resolve the question of Kosovo by war. Perhaps there is some justice that today I should be the person most responsible for finding a peaceful solution.

I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results.