"War burdens the working class, and that was traditionally the source of antiwar sentiments. Quaker founder George Fox was a shoemaker. But William Penn, a convert to Quakerism in 1667, at the age of twenty-three, was the son of a British admiral and an aristocrat with a personal acquaintanceship with King James II. Even after his conversion, he was reluctant at first to drop the aristocratic fashion of wearing a sword. Penn wrote of the power of love and the unchristian, warlike nature of Christians whom he termed—in the ultimate seventeenth-century European insult—to be worse than the Turks. It was Penn who offered the simplest formula for ending war, that it starts with an individual refusing to fight. According to Penn, "Somebody must begin it.""
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2006), ISBN 9780679643357
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Penn
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William Penn
1644 – 1718
englischer Quäker und Gründer von Pennsylvania
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