Pacificism Quotes

“Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“War is the extreme expression of division between people… but people are beguiled into this catastrophic trap by countless tiny steps of division. It begins way back in the virtuous little dissociations of oneself from the weaknesses that are all too evident in one’s neighbor.”
― Philip Britts, Water at the Roots: Poems and Insights of a Visionary Farmer

“Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...), is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party, and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States…

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“The refusal to take part in all war under any conditions is an unworldly view bound to remain a sectarian doctrine. It no more challenges the state's authority than the celibacy of priests challenges the sanctity of marriage.”
― John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

“For instance, there is a wild hypothesis now hardening in the minds of many which has nothing to do with any philosophical case for pacifism, let alone peace. It is the notion that not fighting, as such, would prevent somebody else from fighting, or from taking all he wanted without fighting. It assumes that every pacifist is some strange sort of blend of a lion-tamer and a mesmerist, who would hold up invading armies with his glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“War is the symptom, patriotism is the disease.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“War is the symptom,
patriotism is the disease.
Terrorists harbor patriotism,
Reformists harbor peace.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets