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Peace Quotes

John F. Kennedy, Shakespeare, Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama and Isaac Herzog lead, which makes the page heavy on speeches. For older sources, Byron’s The Bride of Abydos (1813) has the line about a conqueror who makes a solitude and calls it peace. Keats, in Hyperion (1819), has the days of peace and slumberous calm fled, and Albert Schweitzer, in Kulturphilosophie (1923), says man will not himself find peace until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things.

Flagged: Patrick Henry’s “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” and Publilius Syrus on providing in peace what we need in war are both disputed. A passage on creating chaos through psychopolitics, credited to Lavrentiy Beria, is marked misattributed.

Random quote on Peace

Most quoted on peace:

Peace is not solely a matter of military or technical problems — it is primarily a problem of politics and people. And unless man can match his strides in weaponry and technology with equal strides in social and political development, our great strength, like that of the dinosaur, will become incapable of proper control — and like the dinosaur vanish from the earth.

John F. Kennedy

Chronic disputes which divert precious resources from the needs of the people or drain the energies of both sides serve the interests of no one — and the badge of responsibility in the modern world is a willingness to seek peaceful solutions.

John F. Kennedy

This is what I am calling for we will either make peace, and this is what we hope for and spare our people harm or whoever decides anything other than peace will have to convince his own people with the facts.

Saddam Hussein

peace is not lack of war, but a drive toward unity

Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that 'if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression', human rights should be protected by the rule of law. That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.

Aung San Suu Kyi In Quest of Democracy (1991)

Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames. Save it we can — and save it we must — and then shall we earn the eternal thanks of mankind and, as peacemakers, the eternal blessing of God.

John F. Kennedy

How different the peace of God from that of the world! It calms the passions, preserves the purity of the conscience, is inseparable from righteousness, unites us to God and strengthens us against temptations. The peace of the soul consists in an absolute resignation to the will of God.

François Fénelon Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Peace will come soon and come to stay, and so come as to be worth keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their cases and pay the cost.

Abraham Lincoln

The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world, and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

Woodrow Wilson

So long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify It — there can be no peace ‘within’ a nation and no peace among nations.

Ayn Rand Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Respecting the United Nations as the living sign of all people's hope for peace, we shall strive to make it not merely an eloquent symbol but an effective force. And in our quest for an honorable peace, we shall neither compromise, nor tire, nor ever cease.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

Thích Nhất Hạnh

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

Jesus

Peace is the essential prerequisite because without peace we will be unable to achieve the levels of cooperation, inclusiveness and social equity necessary to solve our global challenges, let alone empower the international institutions needed to regulate the challenges.

Steve Killelea

I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled
Above the green elms, that a cottage was near,
And I said, "If there's peace to be found in the world,
A heart that was humble might hope for it here."

Thomas Moore

It is not enough to yearn for peace. We must work, and if necessary, fight for it. The task of creating a sound international organization is complicated and difficult. Yet, without such organization, the rights of man on earth cannot be protected.

Harry S. Truman Address to Congress (1945)

Ultimately, peace is just not about politics. It’s about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don’t exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation.

Barack Obama

The plain truth is the day is coming when no single nation, however powerful, can undertake by itself to keep the peace outside its own borders. Regional and international organizations for peace-keeping purposes are as yet rudimentary; but they must grow in experience and be strengthened by deliberate and practical cooperative action.

Robert McNamara

Do you know what I admire most in the world? The inability of force to organize anything. There are only two powers in this world, the sword and the spirit … in the long run the sword is always beaten by the spirit.

Napoleon

Peace is the best thing that man may know; peace alone is better than a thousand triumphs; peace has power to guard our lives and secure equality among fellow-citizens. Let us then after so long recall peace to the city of Carthage, and banish the reproach of treachery from Dido's city.

Silius Italicus

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