W]hen I addressed people as I used to frequently in the peace movement, there would be, in the last 10 years, always somebody saying, “I am so disillusioned.” Well, being old now, I can be forthright and say, “Who the hell gave you the right to have illusions in the first place?” We have no right to have illusions. So we have only ourselves to chastise when we feel disillusioned. — William Sloan Coffin
Recent
Bishop Desmond Tutu
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. — Bishop Desmond Tutu
Hildegard von Bingen
The rest of Creation cries out against the evil and perversity of the human species. Other creatures fulfill the commandments of God; they honour his laws. And other creatures do not grumble and complain at those laws. But human beings rebel against those laws, defying them in word and action. And in doing so they inflict terrible cruelty on the rest of God's creation. — Hildegard von Bingen
Marge Piercy
This nation is founded on blood like a city on swamps yet its dream has been beautiful and sometimes just that now grows brutal and heavy as a burned-out star. — Marge Piercy
Langston Hughes
O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be. — Langston Hughes
Major General Smedley Butler, US Marines
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. — Major General Smedley Butler, US Marines
George Orwell
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. — George Orwell
Kurt Vonnegut
Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on. — Kurt Vonnegut
Ken Sehested
There’s no such thing as a fruit grown without a root.
Archbishop Oscar Romero
Whoever believes that my preaching is political, that it provokes violence, as if I were the cause of all the evils in the republic, forgets that the word of the Church is not inventing the evils which already exist in the world, but illuminating them. The light illumines what already exists. It doesn’t create it. The great evil already exists, and the word of God wants to do away with those evils. It points them out as part of a necessary denunciation so that people can return to good paths.