You lose nothing through peace. You can lose everything through war.
Interpretation
Choosing peace ensures the preservation of what you have, while war brings the risk of losing everything.
This quote by Pope Pius XII emphasizes the idea that embracing peace leads to stability and security. In contrast, engaging in war is fraught with danger and can result in total loss, making the case for prioritizing peaceful solutions over conflict.
In practice
In a speech advocating for diplomacy, this quote underscores why negotiation is preferable to military action.
If a worker is deprived of hope to acquire some personal property, what other natural stimulus can be offered him that will inspire him to hard work, labor, saving and sobriety today, when so many nations and men have lost everything and all they have left is their capacity for work?
To live without risk is to risk not living.
It might be said that society speaks through the clothing it wears. Through its clothing it reveals its secret aspirations and uses it, at least in part, to build or destroy its future.
The faith of the Church is this: That one and identical is the Word of God and the Son of Mary Who suffered on the Cross, Who is present in the Eucharist, and Who rules in Heaven
True science discovers God in an ever-increasing degree β as though God were waiting behind every door opened by science.
Let no Christian therefore, whether philosopher or theologian, embrace eagerly and lightly whatever novelty happens to be thought up from day to day, but rather let him weigh it with painstaking care and a balanced judgment, lest he lose or corrupt the truth he already has, with grave danger and damage to his faith.
Every thought, every word, and every action that adds to the positive and the wholesome is a contribution to peace. Each and every one of us is capable of making such a contribution.
Genuine harmony must come from the heart. It cannot come from the barrel of a gun.
It is the acid test of nonviolence that in a nonviolent conflict there is no rancor left behind, and in the end the enemies are converted into friends.
Peace is a day-to-day problem, the product of a multitude of events and judgments. Peace is not an 'is,' it is a 'becoming.'
No one has done more to prevent conflict - no one has made a greater sacrifice for the cause for Peace - than you, America's proud missile submarine family. You stand tall among our heroes of the Cold War.
Peace is not just the absence of war. Like a cathedral, peace must be constructed patiently and with unshakable faith.
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