Best Pacifist Quotes

You know, if people are not pacifists, it’s not their fault. It’s because society puts them in that spot. You’ve got to change it. You don’t just change a man – you’ve got to change his environment as you do it.

Slobodan Miloševi?, more than anyone else, caused a division within the Left and Centre Left, dividing the pacifists, anti-imperialists and anti-Americans from the anti-fascists and the internationalists. He reminded too many of us that inaction can be as toxic and murderous as action. He prepared us – for weal or woe – for the new world.

Among pacifists it was above all the English who always insisted on the importance of disarmament. They said that the man in the street would not understand the kind of pacifism that neglected to demand immediate restriction of armaments.

Pacifist propaganda and the resolutions of the parliamentarians encouraged such treaties, and toward the end of the nineteenth century their number had increased considerably.

Some pacifists have carried the sound idea of the prime importance of security too far, to the point of declaring that any consideration of disarmament is superfluous and pointless as long as eternal peace has not been attained.

We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment.

In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.

I’m really a pacifist.

All that a pacifist can undertake — but it is a very great deal — is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.

At heart, we’re all violent raging wolves, but in our actions we can be pacifists.

I think that religions must seek peace and love and therefore be pacifist.

I am peaceful but I am not a pacifist in the philosophical sense.

I’m not a pacifist. I’m not that brave.

I am constantly challenged by pessimists who insist that military solutions are the only way to go. This was true in the 1980s, and it is true today. You should know that I do not consider myself a pacifist; there are times, in my view, when military action may be necessary.

I am not a pacifist, however I do believe that the U.S. tends to resort to force too quickly. I am not referring only to the current administration; the same thing happened in the Balkans, and on other occasions.

I do have an intense respect for pacifists, because I believe that ultimately, if we are to have a truly humanistic as well as libertarian society, violence will have to be banished on this planet.

I have a great admiration for pacifism, but I’m not a pacifist, mainly because I would defend myself if I were attacked.

A.J. [Muste] was a – as he likes to say, a radical pacifist.

Gandhi was such an important figure to the pacifists of the ’30s, and he was such an extraordinary embodiment of nonviolence, that I thought it was necessary to have him in there. When he would say something about the war, it was to some extent news – and he was sure to have a response that was different from that of other world leaders.

I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.

I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn’t as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.

In that respect, Martin Luther King, whom A.J.[Muste] advised in the civil rights movement, was also a radical pacifist.

[A.J. Muste] never engaged in violence but he believed, as [Mahatma] Gandhi did – and he knew Gandhi slightly – he believed that a pacifist had to be active in the community.

I want to put any number of assorted ‘ists’ – such as relativists, deconstructionists, destructivists, postmodernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists and feminists – firmly in their place.

I’m not a pacifist, but I’m not a violent person. I mean, I have a gun. I shoot guns, but I wouldn’t say I love guns. It doesn’t work that way for me.

I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated-the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else.

Theres no way that I could be the president. You cant have a pacifist in the White House… Im an actor. This is what I do for a living.

Pacifism in the face of war is not only irresponsible – it is immoral. Refusing to meet force with force in the name of peace will beget not peace, but further death and destruction, the very violence the pacifists seek to avoid.

Being a pacifist to save your own life is normal, being a pacifist for the lives of others is true pacifism.

A pacifist between wars is like a vegetarian between meals.

Pacifists are like sheep who believe that wolves are vegetarians.

Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.

Nobody who’s ever been to Gulag is a pacifist.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

I’m a pacifist. I don’t believe in ‘good’ wars.