We're a peaceful nation, and you know we're moving along just right and kind of having a, you know, time, and all of a sudden we get attacked. And now we're at war, but we're at war to keep the peace. – George W. Bush, Press Conference, Washington, DC, March 13, 2002

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EXODUS 20 – (THE TEN COMMANDMENTS) - Commandment #6 - Thou shalt not kill.

Romans 12:21 - Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.

 

Matthew 5:9 - Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003....  The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply. - Charles Marsh, New York Times, January 20, 2006

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities - Voltaire

Naturally, the common people don't want war ... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country. – Hermann Goering (Nazi Germany)

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. --Dwight Eisenhower 1953 speech

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth. - Thomas Jefferson

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. --Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? -  Gandhi

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.  - Jeannette Rankin first woman Member of Congress

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.  Justice William O. Douglas

All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.  Edmund Burke.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him. -Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader  (1929-1968)

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei

- - compilation of above is thanks to - Sylvia