Do all the good you can do every day.
--- Peace Pilgrim

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
--- Thomas Jefferson, 1816, thanks to Dave Steele

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
--- Abraham Lincoln, 21nov1864, (letter to Col. William F. Elkins), Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY); thanks to Art Rosenblum

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 not clothed. The 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, 16apr1953

If you speak the truth, have one foot in the stirrup.
--- Turkish proverb, thanks to Dr. John Gofman

Science in this age is the whore of industry and the slut of war.
--- Edward Abbey

If you are thinking a year ahead, sow seed. If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree. If you are thinking a hundred years ahead, educate the people.
--- Chinese proverb

For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.
--- Herman Melville, in Moby Dick

We need to put all our energy into the 5 percent chance that we will make it.
--- Robert Theobald

America squanders about what the entire rest of the world spends on security --- almost $400 billion a year. Who are we afraid of if all the bad guys combined still eat our dust? Isn't it time we started acting like a superpower rather than a two-bit punk with his first gun?
--- Col. David Hackworth, 17apr2001, in Worldnet Daily

Not forgiving someone is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.
--- unknown

The best way to end terrorism is by example.
--- Edward S Herman

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
--- Gen. William Westmoreland, thanks to Magnus Linklater, www.thetimes.co.uk

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
--- Howard Zinn

The slaughter of innocent people by demented religious fanatics with a hijacked airliner is a despicable act of terrorism; but it's no less terrorism, and no less despicable, when innocent people are slaughtered by a cruise missile or an F-16, even if you call it war, and even if the demented fanatic lives in the white house.
--- Don Fong, oct2001

A nation that year after year continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
--- Martin Luther King, Jr, 04apr1967

All bombs are terrorist weapons, whether they're dropped from a plane or strapped to a suicidal maniac.
--- Don Fong, apr2002

The only terrorist organization that has ever nuked a civilian population, is the US government.
--- Don Fong, apr2002

No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back.
--- Turkish proverb, thanks to Jackie Giuliano

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
--- Martin Luther King, Jr

Conservatives are fond of pointing out that there are problems in this world that can't be solved by throwing money at them. There are even more that can't be solved by dropping bombs on them.
--- Molly Ivins, 16jan2003

The Bush doctrine is grounded in the belief that international relations are relations of power; legality and legitimacy are decorations.
--- George Soros, 13mar2003

Many Iraqi people rejoiced at the sight of their American/British liberators, but many more did not, because they had no legs to walk to the sites of celebration, no arms to wave in jubilation or they had no life left to celebrate. The sanitary military term for such people is "collateral damage".
--- Charley Litekey, 7may2003

We fight in Iraq today because Bush listened to a band of right-wing intellectual poseurs who argued America could create a reverse domino effect, turning the Middle East into a land of pliable free-market, pro-Western "democracies" through a crude use of military force. This is rather like claiming a well-placed stick of dynamite can turn a redwood forest into a neighborhood of charming Victorians.
--- Robert Scheer, 5jul2005

PEACE TREE
Intro to nonviolence and consensus