Better World Quotes - Culture of Peace

War is not inherent in human beings. We learn war and we learn peace. The culture of peace is something which is learned, just as violence is learned and war culture is learned.
-- Elsie Boulding

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity.
--Rachel Carson

War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace.
--Norman Cousins

"I believe that love, kindness, compassion, tolerance, and peace can be implanted in the psyche of man only when fear, paranormal illusion and ignorance are removed. We can then shift our attention more to matters of peace, rather than to matters of war."
-- Peter Retzinger

The improvement of life was only accomplished to the extent to which it was based on a change of consciousness, that is, to the extent to which the law of violence was replaced in men's consciousness by the law of love.
-- Leo Tolstoy

Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed
-- Constitution of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)

Wars are not acts of God. They are caused by man, by man-made institutions, by the way in which man has organized his society. What man has made, man can change.
-- Frederic Moore Vinson

CULTURE OF VIOLENCE

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be 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

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

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

PEACE INSTITUTIONS

The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.
-- Walter Lippman

"There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.
-- Woodrow Wilson

For a Department of Peace

On the whole our armed services have been doing pretty well in the way of keeping us defended, but I hope our State Department will remember that it is really the department of achieving peace.
--Eleanor Roosevelt

"Needed: A Department of Peace."
-- Karl E. Mundt

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies.
-- Lester Pearson

We have contingency plans for war, but none for peace.
--Theodore C. Sorensen

ARTS FOR A BETTER WORLD

War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
--Thomas Hardy

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
-- Vaclav Havel

If peace…only had the music and pageantry of war, there'd be no wars.
-- Sophie Kerr