Peter McWilliams Quotes

Violence is a problem we all want to solve. I want to make sure that kids learn to deal with anger by learning how to talk with people to solve problems. Here in the United States Senate I want to make sure we have safe schools, safe neighborhoods and good things for kids to do after school!

Forcible ways make not an end of evil, but leave hatred and malice behind them.

Tackling violence on our streets is a complex problem, and we need not only all parties, but whole communities to come together to tackle it.

[T]here is a vast difference in the attitude of a man with a gun in his hand and that of one without a gun in his hand. When a man does not have a gun in his hand, or a woman for the matter, he or she tries harder to use his or her mind, sense of compassion, and intelligence to work out a solution.

Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as be wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

It would be a good time to replace the drug war with something more constructive. The cure offered the drug war today has probably been more harmful and done more damage than the disease.

Peace is a never-ending process, the work of many decisions by many people in many countries. It is an attitude, a way of life, a way of solving problems and resolving conflicts. It cannot be forced on the smallest nation or enforced by the largest. It cannot ignore our differences or overlook our common interests. It requires us to work and live together.

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

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.

I love peace, and am anxious that we should give the world still another useful lesson, by showing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.

In war one must lean on an obstacle in order to overcome it.

Peace without Justice is a low estate,— A coward cringing to an iron Fate! But Peace through Justice is the great ideal,— We'll pay the price of war to make it real.

Emphasize reconciliation, not resolution. It is unrealistic to expect everyone to agree about everything. Reconciliation focuses on the relationship, while resolution focuses on the problem. When we focus on reconciliation, the problem loses significance and often becomes irrelevant.

If a spaceship from the outer reaches of the galaxy landed on Earth in the next two months, and its occupants climbed out and presented Earthlings with a list of secrets - a simple formula - for making life finally work on this planet without violence, killing, and war, without turmoil, pain, and suffering, without want, lack, and despair, do you think we would be wise to look it over? Even if it contradicted everything we knew to be true or thought to be so?

Everyone believes that the prospect for a civil war has diminished significantly over the past several days. All the mainstream leaders of Iraq believe that civil war must be avoided. It's very positive that they are all saying it.

No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.

Violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems that should be dealt with in very different ways.

When a man vowed to nonviolence as the law governing human beings dares to refer to war, he can only do it so as to strain every nerve to avoid it.

The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war.

I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it, for blood never sleeps.

Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make non-violence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development, for economic and political justice and for violence control.

The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.

War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.

The human race is almost addicted to war. It's like we just can't stop.