Julia Bacha Quotes

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

Reconciliations are for after the violence has ended.

Mediation is one of the most effective tools of non-violence. It can turn parties away from conflict, towards compromise.

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

In human societies there will always be differences of views and interests. But the reality today is that we are all interdependent and have to coexist on this small planet. Therefore, the only sensible and intelligent way of resolving differences and clashes of interests, whether between individuals or nations, is through dialogue. The promotion of a culture of dialogue and nonviolence for the future of humankind is thus an important task of the international community. It is not enough for governments to endorse the principle of nonviolence or hold it high without any appropriate action to promote it.

We can’t prevent every conflict or stop every outrage

Peacemaking and peacekeeping should run in parallel.

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

The alternative is not war or doing nothing. Whoever rejects war is not doomed to appeasement.

Half of all civil wars are post conflict relapses.

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

Diminishing violence is a goal everyone can support, and I look forward to participating in the debate when specific proposals come before the House.

We know that the end of any conflict is always messy. It's never a linear path when you've been at war for almost 20 years. It's never a clean, straight linear path to the end.

Sustaining Peace is happening. But it is the exception - not the norm.

Democracy is, in essence, a form of non-violent conflict management. If war is the worst enemy of development, healthy and balanced development is the best form of conflict prevention.

We cannot build on peace on blood. We are still so addicted to this lie. We have this fantasy that we honor the dead by adding to their number. What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us. This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue drowns us, drowns our children, drowns our future, drowns the world. We have to understand that when we pour these endless young bodies into this pit of death, we follow.

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.

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

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

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.

Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting.

I've always been strongly on the side of non-violence.

My door will always be open to those who genuinely renounce violence and seek peaceful accommodation into our nascent democracy.