The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

We can’t afford to be killing one another.

In time of war the laws are silent.

It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

I hope I would not be so arrogant as to doubt anyone’s religion or belief.

Intervention only works when the people concerned seem to be keen for peace.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

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.

It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.

I don’t feel bitterness, I don’t feel anger towards anybody. Fighting is never emotional to me.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

Our country does not believe in the concept of your God and my God. We believe that all gods are one. We have different ways of accepting Him. All ways lead to Him.

You have to make sure you know why you are going to war and then use decisive force to end it as soon as possible.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Most negotiators are trying to get their way.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it… You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

All religions must be tolerated… for every man must get to heaven in his own way.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

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.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Deliberate violence is more to be quenched than a fire.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

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

No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

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

Both times I was in India, I could not get people to listen to each other. I had to literally tell people to listen to each other and tell them that they can’t get creative and find alternate solutions if they don’t listen to each other. There’s a lot of arguing and justifying.

Disagreement is something normal.

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

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 hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

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

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.

When I was elected President nobody asked me to negotiate between Israel and Egypt. It was not even a question raised in my campaign. But I felt that one of the reasons that I was elected President was to try to bring peace to the Holy Land.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

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

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.