The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
—Oscar Wilde
What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace.
—Joseph Conrad in Under Western Eyes
The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic.
—James Hinton
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
—Virginia Woolf
It’s odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian don’t hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and, most entertainingly, to “rid the world of evildoers.”
—Arundhati Roy
Everyone speaks of peace; no one knows what peace is. We know at best a poisoned peace. No one has lived on an earth without weapons, without war and the threat of war on a large and small scale.
—Christina Thürmer-Rohr
In the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and, ultimately, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
The struggle to maintain peace is immeasurably more difficult than any military operation.
—Anne O’Hare McCormick
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
The situation of the world is still like this. People completely identify with one side, one ideology. ... Reconciliation is to understand both sides, to go to one side and describe the suffering being endured by the other side, and then to go to the other side and describe the suffering being endured by the first side. Doing only that will be a great help for peace.
—Thích Nhất Hạnh
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
—Carl Sandburg
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
—E. F. Schumacher
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
—George Orwell
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
—Mother Teresa
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained. … They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
—Walt Whitman