Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Some day we may be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we will never forgive them for making us kill some of theirs.

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.

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.

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.

War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.

No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.

Peace is not sought in order to provoke war, but war is waged in order to attain peace.

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.

We should wage war not to win war, but to win peace.

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

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

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

I think, personally, nothing comes from violence other than more violence.

At the beginning of this century, people never questioned the effectiveness of war, never thought there could be real peace. Now, people are tired of war and see it as ineffective in solving anything.

You can’t have peace without a war.

We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war.

Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful.

The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever recurring song of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of revenge. Man has never risen above the injunction of the lex talionis: "Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.

We are living in a time of many wars. The call for peace must be shouted. Peace sometimes gives the impression of being quiet, but it is never quiet. Peace if always proactive and dynamic.

Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable.

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

War stirs in men's hearts the mud of their worst instincts. It puts a premium on violence, nourishes hatred, and gives free rein to cupidity. It crushes the weak, exalts the unworthy, and bolsters tyranny .. .Time and time again it has destroyed all ordered living, devastated hope, and put the prophets to death.

No more war, war never again! Peace, it is peace which must guide the destinies of people and of all mankind.