Peaceful Alternatives Quotes

Miseram pacem vel bello bene mutari. Even war is preferable to a shameful peace.

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.

Do the American people really want their President ... to have no other option than to go to war or do nothing?

People turn to violence, because they have no other avenue left.

The $100,000,000 which have been expended in the late Mexican War, would have been sufficient to found 126 free Colleges, each as richly endowed as Harvard University - Library, Professorships, scientific schools and all. If sums of money were thus liberally expended, and for education and its appliances, instead of war and its horrible enginery, who can estimate the happy results which would be the fruit of such policy?

You have to give everybody another recourse as some means other than violence, no matter how distasteful it may be to have to deal with them and what they represent.

People say, 'Surely there's the right reasons for going to war?' And my perspective is, 'Surely there's a better way of asking that question?'

In 2003, Congress should have resisted the rush to a war of choice with Iraq. I will do everything in my power to prevent us from repeating the mistakes of my predecessors.

I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.

War is never a happy solution, but it may be the only solution. We must exhaustively explore other possible solutions before we make the choice for war. Every political and diplomatic effort should be made to avoid war while achieving your objective.

Men and boys always want to go fight. They are always looking for a reason to go to war. It is the saddest thing. They have this abiding notion that war is fun. And no history lesson will convince them differently.

Desperate times require desperate measures. Violence is not only the answer. It is the only answer.

Many other such substitutes for war will be discovered, but perhaps precisely thereby it will become more and more obvious that such a highly cultivated and therefore necessarily enfeebled humanity as that of modern Europe not only needs wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars, consequently occasional relapses into barbarism, lest, by the means of culture, it should lose its culture and its very existence.

If a war be undertaken...before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime.

There are more pleasant things to do than beat up people.

Violence is never ever a choice that a man should make.

One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.

In dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior -- for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure -- and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one.

In between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.

Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.

The only way to address terrorism is to deal with the issues that create terrorism, to resolve them where possible, and where that's not possible to ensure that there is an alternative to violence.