Freeman Dyson Quotes

In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.

In non-violence the cause has to be just and clear as well as the means.

There's not much out there that people are fighting for that leaves them with nothing but honor.

Pacifism as a mass movement aims to avoid suffering; pacifists often say that no cause is worth suffering or dying for. The ethos of Solidarity is based on an opposite premise - that there are causes worth suffering and dying for.

I think the self-burning itself on practice of non-violence. These people, you see, they easily use bomb explosive, more casualty people. But they didn't do that. Only sacrifice their own life. So this also is part of practice of non-violence.

We want to resolve this peacefully but if we can’t, there are some things worth fighting for.

War is a dreadful thing, but there are things more dreadful even than war, one of them is dishonor.

Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.

It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn't fight with honor . . . I fought to win.

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

Force when aggressively applied is "violence" and is, therefore, morally unjustifiable, but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its moral justification. The elimination of force at all costs in Utopian.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for non-violence. Violence does not mean the emancipation from fear, but discovering the means of combating the cause of fear. Nonviolence, on the other hand, has no cause for fear. The votary of nonviolence has to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice of the highest type in order to be free from fear. He recks not if he should lose his land, his wealth, his life.

Violence is not only impractical but immoral.

I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

We have a lot of villains in the world, all right? And the Catholic doctrine says turn the other cheek, the Christian doctrine. But if you turn the other cheek, you could be annihilated. So when is it justifiable to defend yourself and take aggressive action in that regard, like dropping drones on people?

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting.

I do not wish to shed a drop of blood, but 'I must fight the course.' Tis all that's left to me.

There come times when we have to fight for peace.

A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace.

I am still the person who would have died rather than kill you

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight. But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.

We are insane. That is what sin is. Sanctity is identitical with sanity. It means living the truth, living in reality. Sin always substitutes unreality for reality.

One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.