“Pacifists lose the war; aggressors lose the peace.”
Ron English (1959) American artist
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
Speech to the Stalhelm in Münster (13 May 1933), quoted in Frederick Schuman, Hitler and the Nazi Dictatorship (London: Hale, 1936), pp. 345-346
1930s
“Pacifists lose the war; aggressors lose the peace.”
Ron English (1959) American artist
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner
As quoted in Sunday Times Magazine (8 June 1986).
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist
Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru
Source: Songs of the Soul (1971)
Context: War forgets peace. Peace forgives war. War is the death of the life human. Peace is the birth of the Life Divine. Our vital passions want war. Our psychic emotions desire peace.
Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom
The Future of Civilization (1938)
Context: We see the world as it is now, after these defeats of the League, and we can compare it with what it was six or seven years ago. The comparison is certainly depressing; the contrast is terrible. And we have not yet reached a time when we can estimate the full material losses and human suffering which have been the direct result of the ambitions of one set of powers and the weakness of the others. Nor is there any purpose in attempting to do so. Let us, rather, examine where we now stand and what steps we ought to take in order to strengthen the international system and thrust back again the forces of reaction.
In the first place, let us admit that the first ten years of the League were in a sense unnatural. The horror of war to which I have already alluded was necessarily far more vivid than it can be expected long to remain. That tremendous argument for peace, the horror of war, was a diminishing asset. Most of us, at that time, were, I think, quite well aware that unless we could get the international system into solidly effective working order in the first ten years, we were likely to have great difficulties in the succeeding period, and so it has proved.
Sitting Bull (1831–1890) Hunkpapa Lakota medicine man and holy man
Recorded by Charles Larpenteur at Fort Union in 1867. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 73.
“I'm not a warmonger. And I’m not a pacifist either. But I like peace.”
Joseph Kabila (1971) President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2001 up to 2018.
As quoted in "For Congo’s Leader, Middling Reviews" https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/world/africa/04kabila.html?hpw (4 April 2009), by Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times
Muhammad al-Taqi (811–835) ninth of the Twelve Imams of Twelver Shi'ism
[Baqir Sharīf al-Qurashi, The life of Imam Muhammad al-Jawad, Wonderful Maxims and Arts, 2005]