“When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.”— Vera Brittain, amazon.com
“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”— Kristin Hannah, amazon.com
“For years now, we have become almost numb to the violence in Baghdad: Deadly car bombings there conjure up no hashtags, no Facebook profile pictures with the Iraqi flag, and no Western newspaper front pages of the victims' names and life stories.”— Ishaan Tharoor, independent.co.uk
“Love isn’t a quilt. Love isn’t patient, love isn’t kind. Love is a game, a chase, a thrill. Love is wild and war-like, and every man and woman must fight for themselves.”— Lauren Blakely, amazon.com
“I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.com
“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.com
“The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.com
“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?'”— Sylvia Plath, amazon.com
“When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, he said that Muhammad Ali gave him hope that the walls would some day come tumbling down.”— Dave Zirin, thenation.com
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor…”— Muhammad Ali, zenmarxist.tumblr.com
“Religions all have different names, but they all contain the same truths. [...] I think the people of our religion should be tolerant and understand people believe different things.”— Muhammad Ali, cnn.com
“You are my opposer when I want freedom. You are my opposer when I want justice. You are my opposer when I want equality. You won't even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs, and you want me to go somewhere and fight — but you won't even stand up for me here at home!”— Muhammad Ali, youtube.com
“My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mo…”— Muhammad Ali, youtube.com
“Hillary Clinton's history of supporting interventionism puts her in a weird place to be portraying her opponent as trigger happy.”— Yousef Munayyer, commondreams.org
“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com
“And without God, the wars seemed crueller life seemed bleaker. Art seemed foolish. Death seemed stranger now than ever. What was mankind for? What terror flooded us to understand there was no point, no grander plan.”— Kate Tempest, brainpickings.org
“A great nation is judged not by how many millionaires it has, not by how many nuclear weapons it has, but how it treats the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us.”— Bernie Sanders, nytimes.com