Cynthia Ozick Quotes

Peace is a human right and those who deny you peace are those who are violating an essential right.

At the basis of Western states lie violence, slavery and enmity. At the basis of the Russian state lie goodwill, freedom and peace.

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

War is a stage brought about by the standardizing of thought, revolt, and life - not by the freedom of life, not by the revolt of life.

There is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another.

The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.

It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make 'em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

It is better to have a war for justice than peace in injustice.

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

Democracy and violence can ill go together.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in America and never, ever will be!

If one of us is chained, none of us are free...

Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy's answer to conflicts and social problems. Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war.

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

Let tyrants shake their iron rod.

Now they have come to the place where their faith can no longer feed on the bread of repression and violence. They ask for the bread of liberty, of public equality, and public responsibility. It must not be denied them.

Peace does not mean just to stop wars, but also to stop oppression and injustice.

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love.