Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.
Dorothy Thompson
Moderate religious people may of course express distaste for such violence, pretending that the clear calls for grotesque and violent behaviour in their sacred book aren't there and cherry-picking the 'nice bits', but they are still guilty of not opening up the subject of belief to rational discourse, and in doing so are part of the machinery that leads to all the ugliness caused by fundamentalism.
Derren Victor Brown
Governments should not possess instruments of coercion and violence denied to their citizens
Edgar A. Suter
Some people say that Libertarians want anarchy. But anarchy is what we have now. Our cities aren't safe, our schools are centers of violence, the politicians have turned the rule of law into a chaotic web of millions of regulations and mandates. Libertarians want to restore order by removing, wherever possible, the destabilizing influence of government
Harry Browne
I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence.
Edward Bond
By willing endurance we cause suffering to pass. Evil becomes a spent force when we put up no resistance. By refusing to pay back the enemy with his own coin, and preferring to suffer without resistance, the Christian exhibits the sinfulness of contumely and insult. Violence stands condemned by its failure to evoke counter-violence.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation ñ enlightened as it is ñ if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men
Sam Adams
If I go out of public life with one feeling, with one conviction, it is this : a deep regret for many bitter words I have used in my life, deep sincere repentance for my violence of language. But I hope they will be forgiven me by God and man, because not once in all my life have I attacked anybody unjustly from my point of view, and without believing it was my duty to do so.
Joseph-Napolon-Henri Bourassa
Revenge... is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.
Albert Schweitzer
Wherever a set of alternative possible routes toward achieving a given end presents itself, a student movement will tend to choose the one which involves a higher measure of violence or humiliation directed against the older generation
Lewis Samuel Feuer
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A revolution is an act of violence whereby one class shatters the authority of another.
James MacGregor Burns
The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.
William Sloan Coffin