Better World Quotes - Culture of Peace

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CULTURE OF VIOLENCE

* The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.
-- Hannah Arendt

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
-- Isaac Asimov

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
--Joan Baez

There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used...Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they though of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.
--Gil Bailie

"For most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men's violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. …..The reason violence against women and children is finally out in the open is that activists have brought it to global attention."
-- Riane Eisler

It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Violence is a crime against humanity, for it destroys the very fabric of society.
-- Pope John Paul II

"Strange how blind people are! They are horrified by the torture chambers of the Middle Ages, but their arsenals fill them with pride!"
-- Bertha Von Suttner

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.
-- Leo Tolstoy

We challenge the culture of violence when we our selves act in the certainty that violence is no longer acceptable, that it's tired and outdated no matter how many cling to it in the stubborn belief that it still works and that it's still valid.
-- Gerard Vanderhaar