Pacifists

"If men are good, you don’t need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don’t dare have one."

"But history shows repeatedly the madness of crowds and the irrationality of majorities. The only conceivable merit relating to majority rule lies in the fact that if we obtain monopoly decisions by this process, we will coerce fewer persons than if we permit the minority to coerce the majority. But implicit in all political voting is the necessity to coerce some so that all are controlled."

"Government doesn't cure problems. It aggravates them."

"An anarchist is anyone who believes in less government than you do."

"The family unit is the incubator for human character; the state is the incubator for human dependency."

"Government, when it is examined, turns out to be nothing more nor less than a group of fallible men with the political force to act as though they were infallible."

"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure."

"Since I favor total self-control—absolute government of the individual over himself—I believe autarchy more accurately describes, in a positive fashion, the kind of situation I consider most desirable. Some dictionaries define autarchy as a kind of tyranny or despotism, but of necessity it is limited to self-application."

"The bill of grievances contained in the immortal Declaration of Independence could be extended by our own citizens in modern times, had they the stomach for it. … So important is the right and duty of the people to dispense with despotism, this great Declaration contains the sentence not once, but twice. In its final utterance, the choice of words does not call for the formation of a government. Rather, it calls for "new guards" which may or may not entail such a unit as an artificial agency."

"If you have a government of good laws and bad men, you will have a bad government. For bad men will not be bound by good laws."

"Governments, by their nature, are instruments of privilege."

"Government may be intrinsically evil; clearly they operate on the basis of tax predation."

"If people are capable of committing evil deeds, then the people occupying the offices of government will be cut from the same cloth. They are evildoers, too. There is not a single shred of evidence that they will be otherwise."

"But the thing all members of governments desire to do is to rule their own people and to collect money from them. This is inherent in their natures. So the United Nations, perforce, will aid and abet the member governments in their universal desire to maintain a coercive hold over their individual subjects. Thus, the United Nations is a government of the governments, by the governments, and for the governments. And it cannot and will not restrain their governments,…"

"If men are capable of committing evil actions, granting them power over others makes evil actions certain. But there is a difference. When men in government commit and evil act, they are legally shielded from their consequences of the act. ** p. 487"

"Mother Theresa always said, "Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta.”"

"We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighers, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest."

"And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about."

"There are some things to die for but none to kill for."

"Over and over, when I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, "You tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet." (p. 65)"

"We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet. (p. 85)"

"“I asked participants who claimed to be "strong followers of Jesus" whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor."

"I heard one of the teaching pastors at Willow Creek speak on the rich young ruler text that Rich (Mullins) had talked about in Wheaton's chapel. The teaching pastor had said, "now this doesn't mean you have to go sell your rollerblades and golf clubs," and he went on to "contextualize" the teaching to show that we just need to be careful not to make idols of our things. I wasn't so sure about that. Jesus doesn't tell the man to be a better steward, or to treat his workers fairly, or not to make money an idol. He tells this highly educated and devoutly religious young man that he lacks one thing: giving up everything he owns to give the poor. (p. 103)"

"Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the poor rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said."

"For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death."

"The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into"

"Rocking the vote may mean going to the booths and writing in our Candidate, because he doesn't seem to be on the ballot. (p. 335)"

"And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them."

"We were not interested in a Christianity that offered these families only mansions and streets of golds in heaven when all they wanted was a bed for their kids now. And many Christians had an extra one. (p. 64)"

"I remember hearing about an old comic strip back in the days of St. Ed's. Two guys are talking to each other, and one of them says he has a question for God. He wants to ask why God allows all of this poverty and war and suffering to exist in the world. And his friend says, "Well, why don't you ask?" The fellow shakes his head and says he's scared. When his friend asks why, he mutters, "I'm scared God will ask me the same question." (p. 65)"

"I must say that I am still passionately pro-life, I just have a much more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers. (p. 44)"

"Perhaps the devil is just as likely to wear a three-piece suit as to have horns and a pitchfork. And perhaps the angels look more like the bums in the alley than like feathered white babies. (p. 50)"

"I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me. (p. 51)"

"I guess God can use the mafia, but I would like God to use the church. (p. 63)"

"[Girard] overturned three widespread assumptions about the nature of desire and violence: first, that our desire is authentic and our own; second, that we fight from our differences, rather than our sameness; and third, that religion is the cause of violence, rather than an archaic solution for controlling violence within a society, as he would assert."

"When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law - and finds no lawgiver."

"It was Plato who determined once and for all the cultural meaning of imitation, but this meaning is truncated, torn from the essential dimension of acquisitive behavior, which is also the dimension of conflict. If the behavior of certain higher animals, particularly the apes, seems to foreshadow human behavior, it does so almost exclusively, perhaps, because the role of acquisitive mimesis is so important in their behavior, although it is not as central as it is for the human being. If one ape observes another reach for an object, it is immediately tempted to imitate the gesture. It also happens that the animal visibly resists the temptation, and if the imitative gesture amuses us by reminding us of human beings, the failure to complete it, that is to say the repression of what already can be nearly defined as a desire, amuses us even more. It makes the animal a sort of brother to us by showing it subject to the same fundamental rule as humanity—that of preventing conflict, which the convergence of two or several avid hands toward one and the same object cannot help but provoke."

"An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles."

"There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid."

"The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack, that they are never the ones who begin, though in a way they are always the ones. Individualism is a formidable lie. We make others understand that we recognize the signs of aggressiveness which they manifest, and they in turn interpret our posture as aggression."

"The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence."

"There is always an attempt to move away from the Cross, that is, to perpetuate man’s misrecognition of his violence and protect his pride from the revelation. Without the Cross, there is no revelation of the fundamental injustice of the scapegoat mechanism, which is the founder of human culture, with all its repercussions in our relationships with each other."

"every time Yoko Ono pays to have that full page in The New York Times — the “War is Over” page — I’m fascinated by that. I think, well, I’d love to hear her talk about why she continues to do this, because we so much wish it were true. We’d like to be able to say, “Yes, it’s true.” I actually kept that postcard that said “War is Over” in that same font on my wall for years, because I so much wanted to believe it. And yet, you look at the world, and it’s not true, and you think, is this just — is this manifest positive thinking?"

"I learned everything from her. … It is a teacher-pupil relationship. That's what people don't understand. She's the teacher and I'm the pupil. I'm the famous one, the one who's supposed to know everything, but she's my teacher. She's taught me everything I fucking know."

"Remember, our hearts are one. Even when we are at war with each other, our hearts are always beating in unison."

"If your judgement is clouded, you must be carrying too many things which are being a burden to you."

"Don't ever give up on life. Life can be so beautiful, especially after you've spent a lot of time with it."

"Remember, each one of us has the power to change the world. Power works in mysterious ways. You don’t have to do much. Visualise the domino effect And just start thinking PEACE. The message will circulate faster than you think. It’s Time For Action. The Action is PEACE. Spread the word. Spread PEACE. I love you!"

"John and I felt that we were like people in an H. G. Wells story. Two people who are walking so fast that nobody else can see them."

"In a day, sometimes I feel so much love for the world, I think my heart is bursting. Sometimes, I feel so scared, I want to shrink myself even further. I think that’s what happened to us gods and goddesses. Like the dinosaurs, we realized that it’s too dangerous to be so large. So we kept shrinking ourselves to what we are now. We might get even smaller. I see the sign in the engineers making smaller gadgets, smaller and smaller. Pretty soon, our fingers will be too large to operate them. So what are we doing? I trust in the human wisdom. We are incredibly intelligent beings. So we might know something without thinking that we know…. Well, even my best friend didn’t know until now that I was thinking of crazy things like this."