Quotes on Peace Not War

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

Peace and not war is the father of all things.

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.

War...is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.

[T]he essence of so-called war prosperity: it enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.

To wage war on misery and to struggle against injustice is to promote, along with improved conditions, the human and spiritual progress of all men, and therefore the common good of humanity. Peace cannot be limited to a mere absence of war, the result of an ever precarious balance of forces. No, peace is something that is built up day after day, in the pursuit of an order intended by God, which implies a more perfect form of justice among men.

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.

Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing.

Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.

Wars are not paid for in wartime. The bill comes later.