QUOTABLES
Revised
1-26-11
We will
know when new graduates of high schools and colleges talk with other about how,
not whether, they will serve America. We will know when the ambitious recognize
that credible service is a necessary entry on their resumes…For me personally,
I’ll know when a soldier stops a teacher in a train station and says, “Thank
you for your service.”/ Stanley McChrystal, Retired Four-Star
General, U.S. Army (2011)
"From that moment on, I was no
longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American
democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this
country - not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the
horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The
situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of
the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society - cooperative,
peaceful, egalitarian."
-Howard Zinn, from his 1994 memoir, "You Can't
Be Neutral on a Moving Train"
Activism is my rent for living on this
planet."
--Alice Walker,
Pulitzer Prize-winning author
The secret of health for both mind and body is
not to mourn for the
past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live
in the present moment wisely and
earnestly. — The Buddha
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When the
power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace
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The web of our life is of a mingled
yarn,
good and ill together; our virtues would be
proud if our faults whipped them not, and
our crimes would despair if they were not
cherished by our virtues/ Shakespeare
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security
will deserve neither and lose both. -
Benjamin Franklin
We gain
strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop
to look fear in the face ... we must do that which we think we cannot/
Eleanor Roosevelt,
I am a survivor
of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers
built my learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants
killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and buried by high school and
college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help
your students become more human. Your efforts should never produce learned
monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans.
Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make children
more humane ( In Teacher and Child/ Haim Ginott)
Unless you become
more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for
exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers
of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest
interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations.
--
Andrew Jackson, farewell address, 04 March 1837
Our
government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear. Kept
us in a
continuous stampede of patriotic fervor.with
the cry of grave national
emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or
some
monstrous
foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not
blindly
rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded.
Yet,
in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem
never
to have been quite real/
MacArthur,
Douglas, A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches
of
General
of the Army Douglas MacArthur, ed. Vorin E. Whan, Jr. (New York,
1965).
MacArthur, A Soldier Speaks, p. 333.
A
nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death/
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, April 4, 1967
Our lives
begin to end
the
day we become silent about things that matter."
--MLK
Should any
political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and
eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not
hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter
group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are
...Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from
other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.--
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, November 8, 1954
This is what
we are about: We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We
water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We
lay foundations that will need further development.
We
provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We
cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This
enables us to do something and to do it very well.
It
may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an
opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never
see the end results, but that is the difference
between
the master builder and the worker.
We
are workers, not master builders -
ministers
not messiahs
We are prophets of a future not our own
-Oscar
Romero
Former
Archbishop of El Salvador
You never
develop a true sense of confidence if you only set out to do
what
you know you already can. ~Unknown
Nobody has a
more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the
law."
--Sophocles
Man has no
right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only
adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder/ Percy Shelley
When I
despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have
always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can
seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it - always.~ Mahatma Gandhi~
Whether the
mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our
great adversity remains The Apparatus - the bureaucracy, the police, the military.
Not the one facing us across the frontier or the battle lines, which is not so
much our enemy as our brothers' enemy but the one that calls itself our
protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst
betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to
trample under foot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in
others/ Simone Weil, 1933
Although
tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule foreign peoples, it
can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of
its own people
Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitariansm
(1951)
American
imperialism used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination; now it is an
uncomfortable fact of life
Madeline
Bunting, English journalist
We must not
think that our love has to be extraordinary. But we do need to love without
getting tired. How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous
input of small drops of oil. These drops are the small things of daily
life: faithfulness, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of
being quiet, of looking, of speaking, and of acting. They are the true drops of
love that keep our lives and relationships burning like a lively flame./
Mother
Teresa
Peace...will
require...greater understanding and respect for differences within and across
national boundaries. We humans do not have the luxury any longer of indulging
our prejudices and ethnocentrism. They are anachronisms of our ancient past.
The worldwide historical record is full of hateful and destructive behavior
based on religious, racial, political, ideological, and other distinctions -
holy wars of one sort or another. Will such behavior in the next century be
expressed with weapons of mass destruction? If we cannot learn to accommodate
each other respectfully in the twenty-first century, we could destroy each
other at such a rate that humanity will have little to cherish/ The Carnegie
Commission
This we know:
earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All
things are connected like the blood that unites us all.
Man
did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand
in it.
Whatever
he does to the web, he does to himself./ Chief Seattle
A Native
American grandfather talking to his young grandson tells the
boy
he has two wolves inside of him struggling with each other. The
first is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other
wolf is fear,
greed
and hatred. "Which wolf will win, grandfather?" asks the young
boy.
"Whichever one I feed," is the reply.
If only for
half an hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community./ George Bernard Shaw
Failure after
long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to
be called a failure./ George Eliot
Children have
more need of models than critics./ Joseph Joubert
If a doctor,
lawyer, or dentist had forty people in his office at one
time,
all of who had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be
there
and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist,
without
assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence
for
nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom
teacher's
job./ Donald D. Quinn
Modern cynics
and skeptics...see no harm in paying those to whom they
entrust
the minds of their children a smaller wage than they entrust the
care
of their plumbing./ John F. Kennedy
"A
church which cannot take a firm stand against war
is
a church which does not deserve to be believed."
Harvey
Cox, American Baptist theologian at Harvard
Divinity
School
A small body
of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter
the course of history. - MK Gandhi
A human being
is part of a whole, called by us the Universe,’ a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself,his
thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires and to affection
for
a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the
whole of nature in its beauty. /Albert Einstein, 1930
"Our
schoolbooks glorify war & conceal its horrors. They indoctrinate
children
with hatred. I would rather teach peace rather than war, love
rather
than hate . . . . People should continue to fight but they
should
fight for things worthwhile, not imaginary geographical lines,
racial
prejudices and private greed draped in the colors of
patriotism.
Their arms should be weapons of the spirit, not shrapnel
and
tanks." ---Albert Einstein
I spent 33
years in the Marines ...most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big
Business, for Wall Street & the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for
capitalism...I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of
Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico & especially Tampico safe
for American
oil
interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar
interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti & Cuba a decent place for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenue. I helped in the rape of half dozen
Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street... In China, in 1927,
I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I had a swell
racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions... I might have given Al
Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city
districts. The Marines operated on three continents. Marine Commander
General Smedley D.Butler
(Congressional Medal of Honor recipient)
Why is
killing one person murder, but killing thousands is foreign policy?
It is from
numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.
Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of
others, or strikes out against injustice,[s]he sends forth a tiny ripple ofhope, and crossing each other from a million different
centers of energy and daring,those ripples build a
current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
- Robert F. Kennedy, University of Capetown, South
Africa, 1966
"Thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to
pray standing in the synagogues and in the
corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men... But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy
door, pray to thy father which is in secret"
Matthew 6:5-6
Any man
who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of
the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content
with stagnation and willing to endure disaster / William Randolph
Hearst, American newspaper publisher (1863-1951).
When a stupid
man does something he's ashamed of, he claims it as his duty/ George Bernard
Shaw
The
cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest/ William
Sloan Coffin
We tend
to hold certainty dearer than truth. / William Sloan Coffin
Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance
for human life and the environment /William
Sloan Coffin
God has
the authority to end life; humans have the power to do
it/ William Sloan Coffin
Self-righteousness
is the bane of human existence / William Sloan
Coffin
Self-righteousness
is the greatest sin of the United States/ William Sloan Coffin
Power
blinds before it corrupts / William Sloan Coffin
Technology
has outstripped moral authority. We’re beginning to live beyond our
technological means / William Sloan Coffin
You
don’t do something because it works; you do it because it
is the right thing to do. The results of your efforts may not be achieved in your lifetime.
Such
subtle covenants shall be made Till peace itself is war in masquerade / John
Dryden
Our
scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and
misguided men./Martin Luther King, Jr.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies,
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who
are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone;
it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists and the
hopes of its children / Dwight David Eisenhower, 6-17-61
There is something better than victory, and that is the avoidance of war./ Bertrand Russell
They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning
hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn
war anymore./ Isaiah
Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that,
if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the
science of human relationships - the ability of all
peoples, of all kinds, to live together and to work
together in the same world, at peace.... /
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie....
But rather mourn the apathetic throng--
The cowed and meek--
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong,
And dare not speak!/ Ralph Chaplin, 1922
The harvest of justice is sown in peace for those who cultivate peace/ James
3:18
Silence is the voice of complicity./ Fr. Bruni
Peace comes within the souls of men when they realize their oneness with the
universe./ Black Elk
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the
Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a
future and a hope./ Jeremiah Ch. 29, Verse 11.
If you want peace, work for justice./ Pope Paul
We must proceed resolutely toward outlawing war completely and come to
cultivate peace as a supreme good to which all programs and all strategies must
be subordinated./ Pope Paul
World Pledge
I pledge allegiance to the world
To cherish every living thing
To care for earth and sea and air
With peace and freedom everywhere/ Lillian Gesner
GOERING ON WAR
"...of
course the people don't want war....Why should some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of
it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally the common
people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in
England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is
understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country
who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag
the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist
dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship...the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All
you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce
the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same way in any country (pp.
255-256) ...Education is dangerous...Every educated person is
a future enemy" (P. 250)/
Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall and Lufwaffe-Chief, & President of the
Reichstag during the reign of Hitler.
From Gilbert, G.M. (1947). Nurenberg diary. New
York: Signet.
"The art
of leadership ... consists in consolidating the attention of the people against
a single adversary and
taking
care that nothing will split up that attention.... The leader of genius must
have the ability to make
different
opponents appear as if they belonged to one category." / Adolf Hitler
"What
luck for the rulers that men do not think."
/Adolf Hitler
During
our stay on this planet, for ninety or a hundred years
at most, we must try to do something good, something useful
with our lives. By trying to be at peace with ourselves we can help
others to share that peace. If we can contribute to other people’s
happiness, we will find the true goal, the true meaning of life.
/
H.H. Dalai Lama
A man
is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of
plants and animals, as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes
himself to all life that is in need of help./ Albert Schweitzer
..rather
than punishing individuals for their crimes we should destroy the social
conditions which engender crime, and give to each individual the
scope he needs in society in order to develop his life /I. Harris
Life’s
most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others? /Martin
Luther King, Jr.
The
most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed/ Steven Biko
The
moment your heart stops burning with love, those beside you will die of cold/ Mauric
You
must be the change you want to see in the world/
Mahatma Gandhi
Cynicism
is not the weapon that will rebuild the world/ Paulo
Freire
"Never
doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."/ Margaret Meade
This
topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system,
which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in
formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise
him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he
needed. This plague-spot of civilzation ought to
be abolished with all possible speed." (Albert Einstein,The World As I See It_ , 1949, p. 4)
THE PARADOX :
The
paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers;Wider freeways, but
narrower viewpoints; we spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy it less.We have bigger houses and smaller families; more
conveniences, but less time; we have more degrees, but less sense; more
knowledge, but less judgment; more experts, but more problems; more medicine,
but less wellness. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk too much, love too seldom and hate too often. We've learned how to make
a living, but not a life; We've added years to life, not life to years.We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We've conquered
outer space, but not inner space; We've cleaned up the air but polluted the
soul: We've split the atom, but not our prejudice; We have higher incomes, but
lower morals; We've become long on quantity, but short on quality.These
are the times of tall men, and short
character;
steep profits, and shallow relationships.These are
the times of world peace, but domestic warfare; more leisure, but less
fun; more kinds of food, but less nutrition.These
are days of two incomes, but more divorce; of fancier houses, but broken homes.
It is a time when there is much in the show window and nothing in the
stockroom; a time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when
you can choose either to make a difference, or to just hit delete/ Author
Unknown
Wars can be
prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent
them, must share the guilt for the dead./ General Omar
Bradley
"When
words become unclear,
I
shall focus on photographs.
When
images become inadequate,
I
shall be content with silence."
--
Ansel Adams, Photographer
_
_ _
"I
should like to love my country and still love justice."
--
Albert Camus
_
_ _
"You
must be the change you wish to see in the world."
"Use
truth as your anvil, nonviolence as your hammer,
and
anything that does not stand the test when it is
brought
to the anvil of truth, reject it." "Recall the face
of
the poorest and most helpless person you have ever
seen,
and ask yourself if the next worldly action that you
contemplate
is going to be of any use to that person."
--
Mohandas Karamchand 'Mahatma' Gandhi (3 quotes)
_
_ _
"In the
big lie, there is always a certain force of credibility.
The
broad masses of a nation are always more deeply corrupted
in
the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously
or
voluntarily. Thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds,
they
more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie,
since
they themselves often tell small lies in small matters,
but
would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods."
--
Adolf Hitler, from 'Mein Kampf' ('My Struggle')
_
_ _
"The lie
can be maintained only for such time as the State
can
shield the people from the political, economic, and/or
military
consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important
for the State to use all its powers to repress dissent,
for
the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie -- and thus by
extension,
the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State."
--
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister
_
_ _
Intentional
Shalom
by
John Wilmerding
October
25, 2003
We are simple
people;
people
of loving peace,
singing
one another
an
entirely new song.
Living in a
new way,
we
transform our own lives
into
love, into grace
into
deep compassion.
Going out in
the world,
touching
other people,
we
resonate and pray;
we
energize with love.
Seeing
absence of love,
we
reflect in silence.
Struggling
within ourselves;
we
can comprehend it.
Then we
engage ourselves
we
know we can change it
Intentional
Shalom
Transformative
Power
Pulsating
energy,
we
thus transform ourselves
into
agents of peace,
justice,
change, and mercy.
When we
become many,
we
true agents of peace,
our
very lives transformed,
then war will disappear.
[Paraphrased
from the words of Osho
from
volume II of his 'Zen: The Path of Paradox']
_
_ _
"Act as
if the principle by which you act
were
about to be turned into
a
universal law of nature."
--
Immanuel Kant, Philosopher
"Never doubt
that a small group
of
thoughtful, committed people
can
change the world. Indeed,
it's
the only thing that ever has."
--
Anthropologist Margaret Mead
_
_ _
"The men
that American people admire most extravagantly
are
the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently
are
those who try to tell them the truth." -- H. L. Mencken
_
_ _
"I knew
that I could never again raise my voice against
the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes without
having
first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of
violence
in the world today -- my own government.
--
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
_
_ _
Individuals
have global moral obligations which
transcend
national obligations of obedience; they
must
sometimes violate domestic laws to prevent
crimes
against peace, justice and all of humanity.
--
1950's 'Nuremberg Precedent' in Global Law
_ _ _
"I want
to stay as close to the edge as I can ...
Out
on the edge, you can see all kinds of things
you
can't see from the center."
--
Kurt Vonnegut, Author
“Nothing is
plainer than that the sympathy with war is a juvenile and temporary state.”
(from Emerson’s 1838 lecture called “War”)
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