War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone – except God.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

God knows what we are going through when we grieve, and He wants to assure us of His love and concern. He also wants us to turn to Him and bring our heartaches and burdens to Him.

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

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.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

Measures must always in a progressive society be held superior to men, who are after all imperfect instruments, working for their fulfilment.

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States – and war is what they got.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

Fame hit me like a ton of bricks.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

We have but one permanent home: heaven – that’s still the old truth that we always have to re-learn – and it’s only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.

Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war.

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won’t tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, ‚Well, you know: It’s secret.‘

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon – no alternative.

I like being comfortable at airports, in flip-flops with no jewelry on.

This is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‚suspects.‘

The moral disapprobation of society has an impact on behavior in societies.

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

The sexiest people are thinkers. Nobody’s interested in somebody who’s just vain with a hole in their head, talking about the latest thing – there is no latest thing. It’s all rubbish.

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

‚Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age‘ was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

Meditation is not to avoid society; it is to look deep to have the kind of insight you need to take action. To think that it is just to sit down and enjoy the calm and peace, is wrong.

It doesn’t take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

We have practiced diplomacy since the very beginning of the nation. Sometimes it has not worked, and we’ve had to go to war. I always believe you should try to find peace and reconciliation before conflict. That has been the approach I’ve taken.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate… we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

There is no sin except stupidity.

It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren’t able to live in the place you called home.

Reactionaries often describe both Marx and Lenin as theorists, without taking into consideration that their utopias inspired Russia and China – the two countries called upon to lead a new world which will allow for human survival if imperialism does not first unleash a criminal, exterminating war.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.