"The central question of my time is how we can learn to live with each other without killing each other." - activist Kathy Kelly
"...those of us who already have won the dubious right to be equal victims in any nuclear war have also won the right and responsibility to be equal among the planners for peace." - columnist Ellen Goodman
""An eye for an eye" only makes the whole world blind." - Mohandas Gandhi
"Find Non-Violent Solutions" - statement on a placard held by a student at the University of Chicago during a silent protest, spring 1999.
Here is an assortment of some hyperlinks to resources which may be useful in providing information for addressing the issues of reducing and eventually eliminating major weapons systems from our world:
General:
National Missile Defense:
Nuclear Weapons:
Depleted Uranium:
Chemical Weapons:
Biological Weapons:
Land Mines:
Small Arms:
Weapons of Torture
Military Bases
The Military-Industrial Complex:
War Profiteers:
Other Organizational Contacts:
"The death toll from small arms dwarfs that of all other weapons systems...Yet there is still no global non-proliferation regime to limit their spread."
- UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, 2000
"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government."
- Martin Luther King Jr.
"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." - General Douglas MacArthur, speech, May 15, 1951.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.....The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.....This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." - former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower
"If we (and others) really cherished the values that we so tediously articulate, among them world peace, elimination of poverty, racial inequality and social injustice, why - the question will not stay down - do we find it so depressingly easy to fight wars and finance the Pentagon, and so depressingly difficult to rebuild the cities, rehouse the poor and educate decently the nation's children? There must be something that as a society we get out of the values that we actually act out." - Robert Lekachman, New York Times, November 26, 1967
And an historical perspective on social change in our society:
"War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable, in the field of policy and administration as well as mass murder. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy, whose chief characteristic is that it tends to do precisely the opposite, when left to itself." - Eric Hobsbawm, in The Observer Review, 26 May 1968.
"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy." - George F. Kennan, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, 1987.
"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind is intolerable, and so the evidence has to be internally denied."
- Arthur Miller
"We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless."
- former Senator J. William Fulbright
This page updated 6 February 2008.
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