| These quotes and many more can be found
in “Just Words: Quotations on Gender, Nonviolence and Peace”.
This booklet, compiled and edited by Shelley Anderson, is part of
the IFOR produced series Patterns in Reconciliation.
To order a copy, please contact Stan Morris at the IFOR Secretariat: S.morris@ifor.org
"We are all invited to work together for peace. We shall
join hands and minds to work for peace through active nonviolence.
We shall help one another, encourage one another and learn from
one another how to bring peace to our children and to all."
Mairead Corrigan- Maguire,
Northern Ireland, 1976 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
"It’s easier if you catch them young. You can train
older men to be soldiers; it’s done in every major war. But
you can never get them to believe that they like it, which is the
major reason armies try to get their recruits before they are twenty.
There are other reasons too, of course, like the physical fitness,
lack of dependents, and economic dispensability of teenagers, that
make armies prefer them, but the most important qualities teenagers
bring to basic training are enthusiasm and naïvete."
Gwynne Dyer,
War, 1985, London: Guild Publishing
"My ethnic group is the human race. We stayed together
to the end. No one sold the other out."
Fulgence, a teenager in 1997 when Hutu militants attacked his
school in Burundi. The students refused to
divide into ethnic groups even after militants began shooting. He
was one of the few survivors.
"Nothing could be worse than the fear that one has given
up too soon, and left one unexpended effort which might have saved
the world."
Jane Addams
(1860-1935), IFOR member and 1931 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
"Never give up. No matter what is going on, never give
up. Develop the heart. Too much energy in your country is spent
developing the mind instead of the heart. Develop the heart. Be
compassionate. Not just to your friends but to everyone.
Be compassionate. Work for peace. And I say again: never
give up. No matter what is happening, no matter what is going on
around you, never give up ."
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet
"I am disgusted with the hollow talk of disarmament—we
put wreaths on the grave of the Unknown Soldier, who’s pretty
damn well known by now as a symbol of the next war—we will
never have peace so long as the interlocking munitions interests
of Germany, France, England control governmental parties and influential
groups—so long as people go on manufacturing death and trying
to sell it."
Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950), US poet
"What are human beings without the animals? If all the
animals were gone humankind too would die from a great loneliness
of spirit. For whatever happens to the animals soon happens to human
beings. All things are connected."
Chief Seattle
(1786 -1866) American Indian leader
"Activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on
the planet."
Alice Walker, US novelist
"For from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is
greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals
falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying
‘Peace, peace’, when there is no peace."
The Bible,
Jeremiah 6:13-14
"Women are human beings first, with minor differences from
men that apply largely to the act
of reproduction. We share the dreams, capabilities and weaknesses
of all human beings, but our occasional pregnancies and other visible
differences have been used to make for us an elaborate division
of labor that may once have been practical but has since become
cruel and false.
The division is continued for a clear reason, consciously or not:
the economic and social profit of men as a group."
Gloria Steinem (1935- ),
US feminist
"Jihad can only be a struggle for social justice. It can
never be a partisan struggle for power. There
is no Qur’anic verse that can be used to justify war in the
contemporary world. Self-defense can be legitimate, but Muslims
cannot kill civilians or other Muslims.
All modern weapons kill civilians as a matter of course. Talk
of collateral damage is nonsense. So the armed struggle of the Prophet
(peace and blessings be upon him) is no longer available to us.
Now, jihad has to be unarmed struggle."
Rabia Terri Harris,
founder, Muslim Peace Fellowship
"We know through painful experience that Freedom is never
voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1929-1968) US Civil Rights leader
"I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but
over themselves."
Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
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Painting by Helen
Lurye
"The role of women is key. Women were excluded from war
beginning in prehistory, not for biological reasons. They were excluded
because of the contradiction between marriage and war. Wives usually
came from those who were—at least sometimes—the enemy.
Their loyalty could not be guaranteed when a war took place between
their husbands on one side and their fathers and brothers on the
other side.
The exclusion of women from war in prehistory continued in their
exclusion from power in the State, which was founded on the basis
of the culture of war. The equality of women is therefore one of
the key principles of a culture of peace."
Dr. David Adams,
former UNESCO Culture of Peace Director, speaking at the IFOR Council
2002
"It is not gender which is destroying our culture, sometimes
it is our interpretations of culture which have destroyed gender
equality."
Cambodian NGOs’ calendar for 2000
"Too small or ‘atomised’ in its manifestations
and at the same time too large and general to be visible in all
this is the most widespread tyranny of all, the oppression of women
by men. This is not recognized as a ‘conflict’ or ‘mass
violence’, because the direct violence takes the form of
endless numbers of seemingly isolated acts.
It is so ingrained and routine that it is invisible, or at least
largely unrecognized by those who benefit from it or who have learnt
to accommodate it. It is the relationship of domination, which,
in its pervasiveness, overarches all others."
Dr. Diana Francis
(1944-), former IFOR president, from her book People, Peace and
Power: Conflict Transformation in
Action, Pluto Press, 2002
"If you had seen what it was like in that stairway, you’d
be proud. There was no gender, no race, no religion. It was everyone,
unequivocally, helping each other."
Survivor of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York,
September 11, 2001
"If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive.
If you want to see the heroic, look at
those who can love in return for hatred."
The Bhagavad-Gita
"God has mercy upon those who are merciful to others."
The Prophet Mohammad
"It was very hard for me to forgive the Khmer Rouge for
what they did to me, to my family and my friends, and especially
to my beloved country, but the burden of revenge that I carried
for a decade was lightened from the moment I did so. I am sometimes
accused by other Cambodian friends of supporting the Khmer Rouge
because I refuse to accuse them, but if I kill the Khmer Rouge,
I will become like one of them."
Renee Pan, democracy activist, founder of the Cambodian Children’s
Education Fund
"To reconcile conflicting parties, we must have the ability
to understand the suffering of both sides. But how many of us are
able to do that?"
Thich Nhat Hanh
(1926-), Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen master and peace activist
"Individuals have international duties which transcend
the national obligations of obedience.
Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic
laws to prevent crimes against
peace and humanity from occurring."
Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, 1950
"I would say I’m a nonviolent soldier. In place
of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind,
your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you…because
no one has the right to
take the life of another human being."
Joan Baez,
(1941 - ), US folk singer
"Nonviolence is not a garment to be put on and off at will.
Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of
our being."
Mohandas K. Gandhi
(1869-1948), leader of India’s independence movement
"Nonviolence doesn’t always work—but violence
never does."
Madge Micheels-Cyrus,
US civil rights and peace activist
"Peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist
without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development
cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect
for the identity and worth of cultures and peoples."
Rigoberta Menchu,
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Guatemalan indigenous activist
"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything,
but still I can do something. I will not
refuse to do the something I can do."
Helen Keller
(1880-1968), US disability rights activist
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