It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties.Desiderius Erasmus, "Dulce Bellum Inexpertis" in Adages (1515).If there is any human activity which should be approached with caution, or rather which should be avoided by all possible means, resisted and shunned, that activity is war, for there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more persistently ingrained, more hateful, more unworthy in every respect of a man, not to say a Christian.Albert Einstein, statement in Berlin, 1920, as quoted in Einstein : His Life and Times (1947) by Philipp Frank.My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting.Alex Comfort, Peace and Disobedience, in Peace News (1946), pp. ![]() The only way to stop atrocities is to refuse to participate in them. Every government that intends war is as much our enemy as ever the Germans were.the safeguard of peace is not a vast army,but an unreliable public, a public that will fill the streets and empty the factories at the word War, that will learn and accept the lesson of resistance.Vera Brittain, in "What Can We Do In Wartime?", Forward (9 September 1939). ![]() All that a pacifist can undertake - but it is a very great deal - is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (1937), translated as The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. ![]() He addresses his disciples as men who have left all to follow him, and the precept of non-violence applies equally to private life and official duty.
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