72 Quotes On Pacifism

In a world constantly challenged by conflict and unrest, pacifism offers a beacon of hope and a call to embrace peace over violence. This philosophy, rooted in the belief that disputes should be settled without resorting to war, has resonated through centuries, inspiring countless individuals to advocate for non-violent solutions. Our curated collection of the top 72 quotes on pacifism delves into the minds of visionary leaders, philosophers, and activists who championed peace as the ultimate goal. Join us on this reflective journey, as these powerful words serve not only as a testament to the enduring spirit of pacifism but also as a guide to fostering harmony in our own lives.

1. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” - G.K. Chesterton

2. “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.” - George Orwell

3. “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 …” - George Orwell

4. “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.” - George Orwell

5. “There was something else amusing about the house: the irony that the most important battle of the American Revolution--the shoot-out at the Old North Bridge--had taken place just outside the residence of the pacifist Ralph Waldo Emerson. True, Emerson was born after the battle in 1803, but his grandfather had been living in the house at the time of the Revolution, and the juxtaposition of such pacifism against such violence struck Paul as a symbol of an eternal truth about American history: Nixon, that goofy Vietnam War mortician, was right: the silent majority ruled (not the rebellious, pacifist fringe); the majority killed for their property; and there was nothing really revolutionary about the minutemen , who won a war and took over the entire country to ultimately build fast-food restaurants and Disneyland while abolitionists, pacifists, hippies, and environmentalists were left to make well-intended flatulent noises--to write poems such as Ginsberg's "Howl"--in books for other defeated noisemakers. ” - Josh Barkan

6. “No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

7. “There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for.” - Mahatma Gandhi

8. “There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.” - Albert Dietrich

9. “Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.” - Malcom X

10. “Those times you caught them out and showed them up -- they learned how stupid they are. But now you'll never hear the little song of their purring throats, and you'll never know what they think, when you say hello.” - William Edgar Stafford

11. “If it should happen you wake up and Armageddon has come, lie still.” - William Edgar Stafford

12. “Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could. ” - Kurt Vonnegut

13. “Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity” - Stephen King

14. “There has never been a time in my life when I felt that I could take a gun and shoot down a fellow-being. In this respect I am a Quaker.” - Dwight L. Moody

15. “The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.” - George Orwell

16. “In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.” - George Orwell

17. “Jesus was a pacifist.” - Chris Hedges

18. “There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.') It was as you can see, no difficult task. I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the 'peace' movement had decided to borrow from this tattered style book. The mantra, especially in the letters to this newspaper, was: 'Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country.'Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, 'Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one'? 'Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.' 'Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones.' 'Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.' I could go on. (I think number four may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the 'doves' to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to re-read themselves saying things like, 'The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic.” - Christopher Hitchens

19. “Please be peaceful. We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence, I want you to love your enemies... for what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just -- and God is with us.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

20. “Say what you want but you NEVER say it with violence!” - Gerard Way

21. “Those who attempt to conquer hatred by hatred are like warriors who take weapons to overcome others who bear arms. This does not end hatred, but gives it room to grow. But, ancient wisdom has advocated a different timeless strategy to overcome hatred. This eternal wisdom is to meet hatred with non-hatred. The method of trying to conquer hatred through hatred never succeeds in overcoming hatred. But, the method of overcoming hatred through non-hatred is eternally effective. That is why that method is described as eternal wisdom. ” - Siddhārtha Gautama

22. “A pacifist between wars is like a vegetarian between meals.” - Ammon Hennacy

23. “Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.” - George Orwell

24. “If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.” - George Orwell

25. “I think about something I once heard on the radio. About Abraham and Isaac.""I was afraid you'd say something like that." "You asked.""So what about them? I don't really know much about that kind of stuff.""There was a pastor on the radio who said nobody should ever preach that story. Do you remember how it goes? God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice his son to prove his faith.""I agree with the pastor. It sounds like a sick story. Ban that shit.""But isn't that exactly what we do? Send young men off to a war in the desert and ask them to sacrifice themselves for a belief?” - A.J. Kazinski

26. “The friends of Galtieri, Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar and Milosevic make unconvincing defenders of humanitarian values, and it can be seen that their inept and sometimes inane arguments lack either the principles or the seriousness that are required in such debates.” - Christopher Hitchens

27. “If the counsel of the peaceniks had been followed, Kuwait would today be the nineteenth province of Iraq. Bosnia would be a trampled and cleansed province of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would have been emptied of most of its inhabitants, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan. Yet nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority of those that intone the "peace movement".” - Christopher Hitchens

28. “Essentially, I'm a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I'm attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I'm the guy that would not turn the other cheek - but, when people see you're attracted to that, they think you are that.” - Bono

29. “Wise men are not pacifists; they are merely less likely to jump up and retaliate against their antagonizers. They know that needless antagonizers are virtually already insecure enough.” - Criss Jami

30. “Saddam's politics was the politics of the thug, of violence from the outset of his reign. Realism suggests that some people are not going to be tractable in response to purely peaceable overtures. Indeed, it certainly appears that some individuals, including notably Saddam Hussein, will cheerfully help themselves to a yard for every inch offered by well-meaning peacemakers. When we are dealing with customers as tough as that, there is no alternative to being tough ourselves.” - Jan Narveson

31. “Sometimes, a war saves people.” - Jose Ramos-Horta

32. “As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.” - Jose Ramos-Horta

33. “Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.” - William Faulkner

34. “Love does not imply pacifism.” - Derrick Jensen

35. “That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.” - Christopher Hitchens

36. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.” - Mahatma Gandhi

37. “The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle [World War II], while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.” - George Orwell

38. “It was strange to us that none of these three victims made any attempt to resist the attack. Indeed, not one inhabitant in any of these worlds considered for a moment the possibility of resistance. In every case the attitude to disaster seemed to express itself in such terms as these:"To retaliate would be to wound our communal spirit beyond cure. We choose rather to die. The theme of spirit that we have created must inevitably be broken short, whether by the ruthlessness of the invader or by our own resort to arms. It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit. Such as it is, the spirit that we have achieved is fair; and it is indestructibly woven into the tissue of the cosmos. We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be. We die knowing that the promise of further glory outlives us in other galaxies. We die praising the Star Maker, the Star Destroyer.” - Olaf Stapledon

39. “The speaker calls for a careful examination of Christ's principle of turning the other cheek before we use it as a demand or excuse for total personal pacifism. After all, when literally struck on the cheek, Jesus did question the legitimacy of the authority by which this was done.” - John Thackway

40. “The statement by Paul McCartney that, although he was a pacifist, he couldn’t be at this time of war. Which is as daft as being a vegetarian between meals.” - Mark Steel

41. “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
 all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.” - Julia Ward Howe

42. “She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.” - colum mccann

43. “The young officers who had come back [from WW1], hardened by their terrible experience and disgusted by the attitude of the younger generation to whom this experience meant just nothing, used to lecture us for our softness. Of course they could produce no argument that we were capable of understanding. They could only bark at you that war was ‘a good thing’, it ‘made you tough’, ‘kept you fit’, etc. etc. We merely sniggered at them. Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies.” - George Orwell

44. “The idea that war can ever bring freedom is quite possibly the greatest deception that mankind has ever forced upon himself.” - Michel Templet

45. “Why is it acceptable to do such horrible things in the name of staying alive? Would it not have been better had I died with my innocence intact?” - Michel Templet

46. “I find it significant that most of the people who believe in just war have never fought in one; examples: Barack W. Bush and George H. Obama.” - Michel Templet

47. “I absolutely hate the way the United States glorifies its military and its wars. Real heroes fight for peace.” - Michel Templet

48. “I find it significant that most military veterans become pacifists.” - Michel Templet

49. “If I went on a killing spree that left thousands of people dead, I'd be branded as the worst kind of criminal. So why it is okay for the government to do exactly that?” - Michel Templet

50. “Is it morally acceptable to murder one hundred innocent people in the process of catching a serial killer who has murdered ten people? If you think World War II was justified, your answer should be yes.” - Michel Templet

51. “On 11 September 2001, a bunch of Saudis killed almost 3000 US civilians, which led to the construction of a monument in New York City. My question is: Are we also going to build monuments in Kabul, Baghdad, and Tripoli to commemorate the thousands of civilians the US has killed since then? By the way, I should mention that neither Kabul, Baghdad, nor Tripoli is in Saudi Arabia; supposedly, the Saudis are our “friends”, and if you'll forgive the old cliché, with friends like these, who needs enemies?” - Michel Templet

52. “Having been to war myself, I do not understand why so many people are so in love with it.” - Michel Templet

53. “There is no such thing as a “war hero”, because there is nothing about war that is heroic.” - Michelle Templet

54. “When you get right down to it, militaries are essentially legalized mafias.” - Michel Templet

55. “Udžbenik "Geografija za nepismene" izlazi dnevno, kao novine, Narod mora biti u toku šta mu je od jutros Domovina, a šta više nije? Šta ako još noćas neki Odbegli Robijaš, ili Psihopata Zamagljenih Naočara, izda proglas da se napadne druga strana reke, druga strana ulice, druga strana sebe?” - Đorđe Balašević

56. “The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.” - Carl von Clausewitz

57. “It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.” - John Fowles

58. “And do you know another thing, Arthur? Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds.” - T.H. White

59. “But you invite ...”“I invite a bit of military nonsense.”“That’s what I ...”“Duncan, I am a teacher. Remember that. By repetition, I impress the lesson.” “What lesson?” “The ultimately suicidal nature of military foolishness.” - Frank Herbert

60. “War is just a damn nuisance.” - Mark A Hanna

61. “Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.” - David Mitchell

62. “The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass.Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.” - Rachel Maddow

63. “Magistrate: What do you propose to do then, pray?Lysistrata: You ask me that! Why, we propose to administer the treasury ourselvesMagistrate: You do?Lysistrata: What is there in that a surprise to you? Do we not administer the budget of household expenses?Magistrate: But that is not the same thing.Lysistrata: How so – not the same thing?Magistrate: It is the treasury supplies the expenses of the War.Lysistrata: That's our first principle – no War!” - Aristophanes

64. “Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil!Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business.” - Aristophanes

65. “In answer to 'But violence hasn't solved anything!'The hell it hasn't. The application of violence - of killing and a willingness to be killed - on a massive scale is responsible for a lot of solutions. The most recent mass application of violence liberated Kuwait. The most recent mass application of violence on a global scale alone cleansed the world of the Third Reich. Nonviolence and passive resistance did less than nothing to stop Hitler and his henchmen. The Atlantic slave trade wasn't stopped by 'dialogue' or 'passive resistance' or conferences, but by the opened gunports of the Royal Navy; Dachau and Chang-I weren't liberated with pamphlets.” - Markham Shaw Pyle

66. “It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?” - George Orwell

67. “[Nicholson] Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open letter he wrote to the British people on 3 July 1940. "Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans," wrote the Mahatma. "I want you to fight Nazism without arms." He went on to say: "Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." I must say that everything in me declines to be addressed in that tone of voice” - Christopher Hitchens

68. “We'd be the safest country in the world if the world knew we didn't have a gun. Men are not killed because they get mad at each other. They're killed because one has a gun.” - Jeannette Rankin

69. “It is night at the front, a shadow, a shot. The Jew who has just firedhears a moan..."And then, mother, the hair stands up on his head, for only a few feet from him in the darkness the enemy voice is reciting in Hebrew the prayer of the dying. Ai, God, the soldier has cut down a Jewish brother! Ai, misery! He drops his rifle and runs into no man's land, insane with shame and grief. Insane, you understand? The enemy fires at him, his comrades shout at him to come back. But he refuses; he stays in no man's land and dies. Ai, misery, ai...!” - Andre Schwarz-Bart

70. “Moreover [pacifists] do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries” - George Orwell

71. “In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.” - George Orwell

72. “Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accept the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay-and claims a halo for his dishonesty.” - Robert Heinlein in Double Star