Quotes on Ubuntu

There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.

God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God requires of us is that we not stop trying.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

May we look upon our treasure, the furniture of our houses, and our garments, and try to discover whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions.

The law of violence is not a law, but a simple fact which can only be a law when it does not meet with protest and opposition. It is like the cold, darkness and weight, which people had to put up with until recently when warmth, illumination and leverage were discovered.

When asked what he would do if he knew the world would end tomorrow, Martin Luther said, "I would plant a tree."

You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.

Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

The peace process we all aim for will not necessarily be a result of the mere signing of a treaty or agreement. It must become a matter of our everyday lives, so that peace settles and lasts and becomes supported by everybody. We therefore have to give peace all the required care and preserve it and promote it.

Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.

No mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology.

When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row.

If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.

A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.

You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.