"Pacifist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bellicosity and admiration for hard blows in our own nature then we shall set about the task of making an end to it under hopelessly disabling misconceptions. We shall underrate and misunderstand altogether the very powerful forces that are against pacifist effort. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... hard in pursuit armed with shot guns!" supplemented Jim. "I like your pacifist ideas of running a home for Tired ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... I was a pacifist bred in the bone. Yet, caught in Paris at the outbreak of the war, my convictions underwent a rapid crumbling before the rising tide of French national feeling. The American Legion exercised a growing fascination over me. A little longer, and I might have been ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... climbed some more. Then we kept on climbing. Mr. Fred led the way. He had the energy of a high-powered car and the hopefulness of a pacifist. From ledge to ledge he scrambled, turning now and then to wave an encouraging hand. It was not long before I ceased to have strength to wave back. Hours went on. Five hundred feet, one thousand feet, fifteen ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... concern with the causes and objects of the war,[55] when contrasted with the opposite views which he propounded later on, were ascribed to quick political evolution—but were not taken as symptoms of a settled mind. He seemed a pacifist when his pride revolted at the idea of settling any intelligible question by an appeal to violence, and a semi-militarist when, having in his own opinion created a perfectly safe and bloodless peace guarantee in the shape of the League ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... exactly. It is hard to convince commerce and cowardice that at certain times war is the highest of all duties. Neither of them understand patriotism; and yet every trembling pacifist in time of war is a misfortune to ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... he was an irreconcilable pacifist. Needing no answer, he went on: "I am sorry to see that the militarist ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... number of people, either through their "human stupidity" or their cowardice, that he is striving for and towards peace, when every single act of his proves the opposite. Is it enough that, because he declares himself a pacifist, men should go about saying "Thank God that he, who seemed most eager for war, now sings the praises of peace"? And there are others who earnestly implore us to think no more or war "now that William of Germany no longer dreams ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... precisely the same thoughts and the same problems which exercise the more scholarly brains of to-day. Erasmus, as his Pan-German friends liked to remind him, was a sort of German, but he was, nevertheless, what we should now call a Pacifist. He can see nothing good in war and he eloquently sets forth what he regards as its evils. It is interesting to observe, how, even in its small details as well as in its great calamities, war brought precisely the same experiences ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... himself a pacifist; professed to be humanitarian, previously putting the enemy outside humanity.... Oh, how much franker it would have been to yield to force than to lend himself to its dishonouring compromises! It was thanks to such sophistries as his that the idealism of young men was thrown ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... would be a serious mistake to assume that the dangers are confined to our industrial system. "The very first general fact that must be driven home to Americans is that the pacifist movement in this country, the growth and connections of which are an important part of this report, is an absolutely integral and fundamental part of international socialism." European socialism, from which ours ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... no patched-up peace," says Mr. RAMSAY MACDONALD. But if the assaults upon pacifist meetings continue we feel sure there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... who have been tormented in their childhood in his name include him in their general loathing of everything connected with the word religion; whilst others, who know him only by misrepresentation as a sentimental pacifist and an ascetic, include him in their general dislike of that type of character. In the same way a student who has had to "get up" Shakespear as a college subject may hate Shakespear; and people who dislike the theatre may include ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... On this and other matter, however, the individual reader, having paid his money (7s. 6d. net), remains at liberty to take his choice. One revelation at least emerges clearly enough from Lord HALDANE'S pages—the danger of playing diplomat to a democracy. "Extremists, whether Chauvinist or Pacifist, are not helpful in avoiding wars" is one of many conclusions, double-edged perhaps, to which he is led by retrospect of his own trials. His book, while making no concessions to the modern demand for vivacity, is one that no student of the War and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... The pacifist argument on the economic futility of national ambitions will commonly rest its case at this point; having shown as unreservedly as need be that national ambition and all its works belong of right under that rubric of the litany that speaks of Fire, Flood and Pestilence. ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... "I've always considered myself a pacifist, but when somebody starts shooting at me, I forget about it and am inclined ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... against them in strikes; also because they are internationalists, who believe that the sole interest of the working man everywhere is to free himself from the tyranny of the capitalist. Their outlook on life is the very reverse of pacifist, but they oppose wars between States on the ground that these are not fought for objects that in any way concern the workers. Their anti-militarism, more than anything else, brought them into conflict with the authorities in the years preceding the war. But, as was to be expected, it did not ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Elixir let a yell out of it like a foghorn and bolted. It returned twenty-four hours later with its tail between its legs, a convinced pacifist. The disgusted O'Brien at once changed its name to Bertrand Russell, after some philosopher who palliates German methods of warfare, and gave it to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... Nora, "for in that case you would become a pacifist, for Kathleen, just like mother, you know, is a terrible peace person. Indeed, our family is divided on that question—Daddy and I opposed to the rest. And you know pacifists have this characteristic, that they are ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... that help us? The fact remains. Ireland is the only, or the chief, cause of American apathy to-day. This is of vital importance. Could we hope to win the war if America dropped out? Russia has gone. The President of the United States has many pacifist men around him. Their movement is strong. Germany is abstaining from outrages that would raise American feeling. I say, the danger of peace proposals which we could not accept being offered to America and accepted by her is a real and a very ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... suggested to him, all the excitement seems absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of The Lament of Tasso express the pacifist sentiment, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... guns knowing that they faced justice, however stern and oppressive; and that what they had engaged to confront was before them. He had no such thought to soothe from his mind anger or unforgiveness. He who was a pacifist was compelled to revolt to his last breath, and on the instruments of his end he must have looked as on murderers. I am sure that to the end he railed against oppression, and that he fell marvelling that the world can truly be as it is. With ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... make an enduring name for himself as Secretary of State. In the years that had elapsed since he was Colonel of the Third Nebraska he had become an ardent pacifist, and he dreamed of going into history with a title greater than that of any other statesman who ever lived—for such, surely, would have been the meed of the man who abolished war. That mind of his, honest as the day, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... as necessary as eating, drinking or any other business. Statesmen like Machiavelli and Bacon were keen for the largest armies {488} possible, as the mainstay of a nation's power. Only Erasmus was a clear-sighted pacifist, always declaiming against war and once asserting that he agreed with Cicero in thinking the most unjust peace preferable to the justest war. Elsewhere he admitted that wars ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... passion of patriotism, as divorced from material interest, is being modified by the pressure of material interest?" (p. 167.) "Piracy was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not business." (Speaking of the old Vikings, p. 245.) "The pacifist propaganda has failed largely because it has not put (and proven) the plea of interest as distinct from ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... a Pacifist, and kept telling people that if only the United States would stay out of this war, and gather up what Europe was wasting, she would soon be in actual possession of the capital of the world. There was a kind of logic in Bayliss' utterances that shook ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... calculations of some of these extreme and apparently quite unreasonable "pacifists" are right. Before the war is over there will be a lot of money in the pacifist business. The rich curs of the West End will join hands with the labour curs of the Clyde. The base are to be found in all classes, but I doubt if they dominate any. I do not believe that any interest or group of interests in Great Britain can stand in the way of the will of the ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... editorial comment for a most widely read American weekly, "except a lot of poverty, a lot of cripples, and a lot of sodden hate in the hearts of the people engaged. Europe will not be changed appreciably as a result of the war!" Our pacifist ex-Secretary of State, I remember, wrote Baron d'Estournelles de Constant inquiring what the French were fighting for, implying that to the reasonable onlooker there was no clear issue involved in the whole business, merely the passions ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... United States, I find America confronted by the same peril and shame. Here, too, I find anti-Jewish meetings being held. To my great astonishment and regret, I find that the personal influence and the vast fortune of the erstwhile pacifist-philanthropist are apparently enlisted in the same cruel and vicious propaganda. The Dearborn Independent, which is the personal organ of Mr. Henry Ford, maintained for the promulgation of his ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... the two men more healthily in accord than on the Boer War. In an interesting study of Belloc, prefixed to a French translation of Contemporary England, F. Y. Eccles explains how he and most of the Speaker group differed from the pacifist pro-Boers, who hated the South African war because they hated all wars. The young Liberals on the Speaker were not pacifists. They hated the war because they thought it would harm England—harm her morally—to be fighting ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the Mother Country to put down the Indian Mutiny, a mutiny which, if it had succeeded, would have thrown India back a thousand years, into the welter of her age-long wars; and these wars themselves would soon have snuffed out all the "Pacifist" Indian Nationalists who bite the British hand that feeds them, though they want Britain to do all the paying and fighting of Indian defence. The Navy enabled the Mother Country to save Egypt from ruin at ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood |
