America is addicted to wars of distraction.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
—Ernest Hemingway
Making weapons is what we know how to do best, the supreme achievement of late-twentieth-century American civilization. To this blessed work we assign our finest intellect and the largest share of our treasure, and in the magnificence of an aircraft carrier or a cruise missile we find our moral and aesthetic equivalent of the Sistine ceiling and Chartres Cathedral.
—Lewis Lapham
Q: What's the difference between religion and patriotism?
A: When a dog howls at the moon, that's religion. When a dog barks at a stranger, that's patriotism.
—Unknown
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
—Simone Weil
If I got to make just one law, it would be that the men who make the decisions to drop bombs would first, every time, have to spend one whole day taking care of a baby. We were not made to do this killing thing, I swear. Back up. It's a big mistake.
—Barbara Kingsolver
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
—Jeannette Rankin
Say yes when nobody asked.
—Lao proverb
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
—Pema Chödrön
People should worry about each other. Because worry is just love in its worst form. But it's still love.
—Simon Gray
God has… ordered things that we may learn to bear one another's burdens; for there is no man without his faults, none without his burden. None is sufficient unto himself; none is wise in himself; therefore, we must support one another, comfort, help, teach, and advise one another.
—Thomas à Kempis
We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
—W. H. Auden
Do not run toward pain, but do not run from it, either. Pain is your guide. Pain is what guides a person in every serious undertaking. Unless an aching longing and passion arises in someone to get or achieve something, he will never get or achieve it.
—Andrew Harvey
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
—Patti Smith
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
—Vaclav Havel