Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.

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

There is no time left for anything but to make peace work a dimension of our every waking activity.

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.

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups or between groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to be run. If you look back, you will see that warfare was an invention, just as ways of handling government or taxes are inventions. You will see, too, that once people use an invention they go on using it until they find another which they think is superior.

I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.

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

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.

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.

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.

I believe that peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Nonviolence is a good starting point. Those of us who believe in this method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the voices of violence, hatred, and emotion. We can very well set a mood of peace out of which a system of peace can be built.

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!

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.

To reach peace, teach peace.

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.

Anything war can do, peace can do better.

I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.

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.

We have to start from the fact that there are always alternatives to violence.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Every day in the news we're hearing how rampant violence is in our communities, both here in America and around the world. I believe that the establishement of a United States Department of Peace can greatly help alleviate the many problems that we hear about on a daily basis. Our children deserve so much better. It is our job right here and now to build a better world. By establishing a US Department of Peace we are doing just that. Please get involved ... It's up to us to be the change that we wish for and the time is now to co-create it.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.