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ENEMIES

I count him braver who overcomes his desires
than him who conquers his enemies;
for the hardest victory is over self.
-- Aristotle

"It is important for people to realize that we can make progress against world hunger,
that world hunger is not hopeless. The worst enemy is apathy."
-- Reverend David Beckmann
* "The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate,' are designed precisely to create 'widows and orphans,' to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses."
-- Daniel Berrigan

* In these disturbing and distressing times, surely it's cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than it is to defend yourself against them..Justice is the surest way to get peace.
-- Bono

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.
It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy.
You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."
-- Ray Bradbury
There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat?
-- General Lee Butler

* “If you believe in a security strategy -- a strategy of more friends and fewer enemies, a strategy of greater cooperation and a strategy of keeping America better at home as we grow more diverse -- we have to build the minds and hearts to build this kind of world.”
~ Bill Clinton

The greatest friend of truth is time, her greatest enemy is prejudice, and her constant companion humility.
-- Charles Colton

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage - pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically - to say 'no' to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger 'yes' burning inside. The enemy of the 'best' is often the 'good.'
-- Stephen Covey

As they were during the Cold War, urban population centers remain the most likely targets of a nuclear attack. Now, however, an attack may come without warning from an unknown enemy, to achieve unclear motives.
-- Alan Cranston

 

* "I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.”
-- Sheryl Crow

* "In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher."
-- 14th Dalai Lama

* As a people, we value family, education and success. Hunger is an enemy to all three. Scientific studies have demonstrated that even brief periods of hunger can permanently inhibit a child's mental, emotional and physical growth. Kids who are hungry do poorly in school and are unlikely to grow into productive adults. For families, experiencing hunger means living in a world of isolation and shame. Caring citizens must put an end to this disgrace.
-- Ted Danson

"What we would like to do is change the world-make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute…we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend."
-- Dorothy Day

"If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies."
-- Moshe Dayan

"Peace does not fare well where poverty and deprivation reign. It does not flourish where there is ignorance and a lack of education and information. Repression, injustice and exploitation are inimical with peace. Peace is gravely threatened by inter-group fear and envy and by the unleashing of unrealistic expectations. Racial, class and religious intolerance and prejudice are its mortal enemies."
-- Frederik W. de Klerk

* I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision. . . is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive
-- Barbara Deming

"There hasn't been peace on earth because people can't seem to figure out
that the real enemy is the people manipulating world events from behind the scenes for their own selfish interests."
-- James Dye

Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay -- it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.
-- Marian Wright Edelman

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
-- Albert Einstein

Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
-- Albert Einstein

Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?
-- Desiderius Erasmus

Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies are the enemies of underdeveloped countries. On the other hand ... a regime which is completely oriented towards the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands of a few who regard the nation as a whole with scorn and contempt.
-- Frantz Fanon

* The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.”
-- Benjamin Franklin

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none. -- Benjamin Franklin

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
-- Betty Friedan

"It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi

* Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi

 

The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies.
~ Al Gore

“In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.”
-- Thich Nhat Hanh

There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye
keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.
-- Homer
So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.
- Elbert Hubbard
Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized man.
-- King Hussein of Jordan

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
-- William James

Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
-- John F. Kennedy

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic
-- John F. Kennedy

“Progress is a nice word, but change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.”
-- Robert F. Kennedy

* "Love is the only force capable of turning an enemy into a friend."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. -- Martin Luther King, Jr

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. -- Martin Luther King, Jr

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty." -- Martin Luther King, Jr
War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose;
then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering;
in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
-- Karl Kraus

* "I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
-- James Madison
"If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.
-- Nelson Mandela

"Men dig their graves with their own teeth and die by those fated instruments more than the weapons of their enemies. "
-- Thomas Moffett

In an interconnected world, the defeat of international terrorism – and most importantly, the prevention of these terrorist organizations from obtaining weapons of mass destruction -- will require the cooperation of many nations. We must always reserve the right to strike unilaterally at terrorists wherever they may exist. But we should know that our success in doing so is enhanced by engaging our allies so that we receive the crucial diplomatic, military, intelligence, and financial support that can lighten our load and add legitimacy to our actions. This means talking to our friends and, at times, even our enemies.
-- Barack Obama

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
--George Orwell

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
-- Thomas Paine

It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.
-- Katherine Paterson

 
Misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace.
-- Lester B. Pearson
* The foes now are universal - poverty, famine, religious radicalization, desertification, drugs, proliferation of nuclear weapons, ecological devastation. They threaten all nations, just as science and information are the potential friends of all nations. Classical diplomacy and strategy were aimed at identifying enemies and confronting them. Now they have to identify dangers, global or local, and tackle them before they become disasters.
-- Shimon Peres
Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.
-- Petrarch

* Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
-- Wendell Phillips

"The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense."
-- Pablo Picasso

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.
-- Norman Podhoretz
"Peace is not made with friends. Peace is made with enemies."
--Yitzhak Rabin
* What shall we choose? Violence or non violence? …We have to choose knowing that when we are violent to our enemies, we do violence to ourselves. When we brutalize others, we brutalize ourselves. And eventually we run the risk of becoming our oppressors.
-- Arundhati Roy

"There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague enemy who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population."
-- Paul Rusesabagina

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
-- Sun Tzu

Who is a hero? He who turns his enemy into a friend.
--The Talmud

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity,
the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.
-- Raoul Vaneigem

Superstition is great enemy of man but bigotry is worse.
-- Swami Vivekananda

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
-- Voltaire

 


* War and the preparation for war rob resources from human security. As long as we honour war and warriors we maintain fear and hate, always based on ignorance; and fear is the enemy of learning, it gives ignorance its power. As long as we misplace money for weapons – we keep water polluted, we keep far too many women illiterate and unskilled, we prevent health care and education from being universally enjoyed – we promote poverty. These are among the root causes of violent conflict.
-- Cora Weiss

* May we not succumb to thoughts of violence and revenge today, but rather to thoughts of mercy and compassion. We are to love our enemies that they might be returned to their right minds.
-- Marianne Williamson

* The Department of Peace would take a more human approach to healing our society, looking not merely for ways we can destroy an enemy, but for more powerful ways to create new friends. While the State Department engages in international diplomacy, there is no domestic parallel. There is no department seeking to harness the power of a nonviolent heart.
-- Marianne Williamson

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
-- Oscar Wilde

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
-- Woodrow Wilson

There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom. The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution and in the leaders of this nation who embraced the age of reason. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces science and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism as love of country and of the people who make it strong. It defends all citizens against unjust coercion and irrational conformity. This second vision is our vision. It is the vision of a free society. We must be bold enough to proclaim it and strong enough to defend it against all its enemies.
-- Rabbi Sherwin Wine

 

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