131 Quotes About Pacifism

Jesus was a pacifist.

Pacifists have usually regarded the use of violence as absolutely wrong, irrespective of its consequences. This, like other ‘no matter what’ prohibitions, assumes the validity of the distinction between acts and omissions. Without this distinction, pacifists who refuse to use violence when it is the only means of preventing greater violence would be responsible for the greater violence they fail to prevent.

The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass.Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

Whether love last but one brief span of time or for eternity, it is the only creative, inspiring, elevating basis for a new race, a new world.

Violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing—only sometimes nothing is what people want. Death is what they want. And they get it.

I say I’m a pacifist because I am a violent son of a bitch. I’m a Texan. I can feel it in every bone I’ve got. And I hate the language of pacifism because it’s too passive. But by avowing it, I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what is true.

So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

There is no such thing as a "just" war. It's just war. And it's antithetical to the Gospel.