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Skeleton Woman In Seattle

When I was able to open my eyes, I saw lying next to me a young man, nineteen, maybe twenty at the oldest. He was in shock, twitching and shivering uncontrollably from being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed at close range. His burned eyes were tightly closed, and he was panting irregularly. Then he passed out. The sidewalk was wet from the water that a medic had poured over him to flush his eyes.

Foot Soldier

The Long Walk For Justice And Peace — A Conversation With Satish Kumar

The central realization that pulled me away from monkhood was that there is no escaping from life; the spirit has to be practiced in the everyday world, and not outside of it. The world is beautiful — the earth, the land, the people — and you have to accept even pain and suffering as part of that beauty. That realization threw me into the social, political, economic, cultural arena. It convinced me that wholeness of life is paramount.

Finding Peace After A Lifetime of War

From the day I was born, I was trained to be a soldier, encouraged in the way I was brought up to hunt, kill, dominate, rule, and control my environment. My family life was a form of war, filled with anger and violence, which made it no different from that in most of the houses around mine.

On Racism And Nonviolence

An Interview With Arun Gandhi

Peace without nonviolence is impractical. Some people think, if there is no war, we have peace. But, in effect, no society is at peace at the moment. In the United States, there is street violence. This is not peace at all. No country has ever made an attempt to achieve a thoroughly peaceful society.

Odyssey Of Resistance

An Interview With Daniel Berrigan

Americans don’t generally think of the consequences of war. We have grown calloused souls, with the help of a duplicitous leadership, an inert Congress, a morally cloudy church, and the jingoistic media. Add to this our historically embedded racism and you have a poisonous brew indeed, hardening hearts against thought or concern for the slaughtered innocents of Iraq.

Sunbeams

There is a bird in a poem by T.S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

Ursula Le Guin

The Way Of Peace

Wherever we may live, each of us is aware that there is an ever-mounting confusion in the world. This loss of orientation, this degeneration of values, is not restricted to any particular class or nation. Wherever we live, at whatever level of society, we are aware of conflict and misery that seem to have no end.

Sunbeams

When you’ve parked the second car in the garage, and installed the hot tub, and skied in Colorado, and wind-surfed in the Caribbean, when you’ve had your first love affair and your second and your third, the question will remain, where does the dream end?

Mario Cuomo

Sunbeams

It is not your obligation to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit.

The Talmud

Study War No More

An Interview With Colman McCarthy

Pacifists believe in force: the force of justice, the force of ideas, of love, of organized resistance to Caesar and the Pharaohs. Others solve their problems through the force of fists, guns, armies, and nukes. There’s no third way. Any problem you have, whether at home with your family or among governments, is going to be solved through the use of force: nonviolent force or violent force.