#pacifism

How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#pacifism #war #business

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

#world-war-i #attitude

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

#violence #war #change

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

#feminism #gender-roles #greek-literature #pacifism #war

The idea that war can ever bring freedom is quite possibly the greatest deception that mankind has ever forced upon himself. ↗

— Michel Templet

#philosophy #war #freedom

I will never buy a fish tank, because I don't believe in supporting the funding of aquatic war machines. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#fish-tank #funny #nonsense #pacifism #funny

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

#labour #pacifism #peace #war #intelligence

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

#leftism #noninterventionism #pacifism #peace-movement #iraq

Having been to war myself, I do not understand why so many people are so in love with it. ↗

— Michel Templet

#pacifism #war #love

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

#nature