It’s a lose-lose situation to get in a confrontation on the street. If you can break contact and get away, break contact and get away. That’s what you should learn self-defense for.

I think if someone gets kicked in the face it is their fault – they watched the foot come towards their face.

I used to get into a lot of fights.

I don’t have big security guards. I don’t have an entourage.

In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also.

We win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party.

Occasionally the conflict between ‚what we stand for‘ and ‚what we do‘ has been forthrightly addressed.

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

In my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance, there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the government. The government will not use force unless force is used against it.

Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you, you will be neither successful nor happy.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Foe means enemy. Now, will we have differences of opinion with the Russians? Yes. Will they get mad at us from time to time, and we get mad at them? That’s part of the normal diplomatic relations.

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

Deliberate violence is more to be quenched than a fire.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is, to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company.

War is never a lasting solution for any problem.

I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the U.S. to cease acting as if they don’t understand what is going on.

Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

If you get down and quarell everyday, you’re saying prayers to the devil, I say.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it’s an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.

Clean fighting solves everything. It ends all bad blood and any ill feelings people have. That’s my thoughts.

Always remember that your calmness under fire is your best defense in any argument or discussion.

Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.

As we dread any disease that undermines the health of the body, so should we deplore contention, which is a corroding canker of the spirit.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

If you can’t answer a man’s arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

Because I know about the Holy Land, I’ve taught lessons about the Holy Land all my life, and – but you can’t bring peace to Israel without giving the Palestinian also peace. And Lebanon and Jordan and Syria as well.

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

People want to tear me down, they were going to knife me anyway.

Maybe if everybody in leadership was a woman, you might not get into the conflicts in the first place. But if you watch the women who have made it to the top, they haven’t exactly been non-aggressive – including me.

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows – pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music… That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

My position has always been, along with many other people, that any differences be resolved in a nonviolent way.

It is far more important to be able to hit the target than it is to haggle over who makes a weapon or who pulls a trigger.

Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It’s this – no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.

As soon as I go out into the world, I belong, in a way, to everyone else. It’s legal to follow me. It’s legal to stalk me at the beach. And I can’t call the police or ask them to leave.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

Consider, when you are enraged at any one, what you would probably think if he should die during the dispute.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

No war is over until the enemy says it’s over.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.

I grew up in an environment where being polite was taken as a weakness. So I just fought everybody.