A civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet.
The healing of ourselves is the healing of the whole nation. Society is only a manifestation of our collective consciousness and our collective consciousness has a lot of fear, violence and hatred in it. ... It is possible to transform our heart...Not much time is needed...(the transformation can be born) the moment you vow to go in the direction of peace and service.
Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.
America is interested in change and reform in the Middle East but in a stable way.
The world's greatest makers of swords can become the greatest makers of plowshares.
The club that kills can drive a stake into the ground to hold a shelter. The hands that build bombs can be used to build schools. The minds that coordinate the activities of violence can coordinate the activities of cooperation. When the activities of life are infused with reverence, they come alive with meaning and purpose.
For the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished that the manly employment of agriculture and the humanizing benefits of commerce would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; and the swords might be turned into ploughshares, the spears into pruning-hooks, and as the Scripture expresses it, "the nations learn war no more.
As far as a nuclear weapons-free zone, you know, when the lion lies down with the lamb, and you don't need a new lamb every day to satisfy the lion, then we might have this kind of transformation in the Middle East.
There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.
God is a peaceful ground of being. He is the energy of nonviolence. To ask Him to help is to ask Him to turn us into profoundly peaceful people.
We don't need to fight the forces of chaos so much as we need to restore and revitalize the forces of peace.
Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection.
Whatever else it is, the kingdom of God is decidedly not a call to violent revolution.
Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.
