Our choice is not between war and peace but between life with dignity or without
Subcomandante MarcosRead
The word of the oldest of the old of our peoples didn't stop. It spoke the truth, saying that our feet couldn't walk alone, that our history of pain and shame was repeated and multiplied in the flesh and blood of the brothers and sisters of other lands and skies.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of human experiences and the collective history of suffering.
Subcomandante Marcos highlights the idea that the struggles faced by one group are reflected in the experiences of others across the globe. It calls for an acknowledgment of shared pain and the collective responsibility we have toward each other as part of a larger human history and community.
In practice
During a speech at a human rights rally, this quote could be used to emphasize the need for global solidarity.
Our choice is not between war and peace but between life with dignity or without
Always, since our birth, we've insisted on another way of doing politics. Now, we had the chance to do it without arms, but without stopping being Zapatistas; that's why we keep the masks on.
The powerful have invoked God at their side in this war, so that we will accept their power and our weakness as something that has been established by divine plan. But there is no god behind this war other than the god of money, nor any right other than the desire for death and destruction... Today there is a “NO” which shall weaken the powerful and strengthen the weak: the “NO” to war.
In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice.
Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
We have embarked globally on a path of unsustainable development. Our lifestyles, the way we produce goods and services, are all part of a system that is completely unsustainable. I see solutions to climate change leading to a much larger philosophical shift in the way human society develops. We need a new matrix to define what human progress is.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
Trouble and prayer are closely related. Trouble often drives men to God in prayer, while prayer is but the voice of men in trouble.
Before me things created were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
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