Justice:

JUSTICE:

“No man can write who is not first a humanitarian”
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate

“A just society is that society in which ascending sense of reverence and descending sense of contempt is dissolved into the creation of a compassionate society”
B.R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNAdYLbGLKY

“We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe.”
Vandana Shiva https://twitter.com/drvandanashiva

“There is nothing more ancient than the truth.”
Rene Descartes

“Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.
(English: “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”)
Rene Descartes

“Justice is truth in action”
BENJAMIN DISRAELI, speech, Feb. 11, 1851

HUMAN NATURE:
(Anger is about emotion and often involves blame: we can learn to change our attitudes)

“Anyone can become angry — that is easy. But to be angry with the right person,to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way; this is not easy.”
Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) Greek philosopher.

“Anger ventilated often hurries towards forgiveness;anger concealed often hardens into revenge.”
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) British politician, poet and critic.

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) U.S. poet, essayist and lecturer.

“He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.”
Plato (BC 427-BC 347) Greek philosopher
.
“No one is as angry as the person who is wrong.”
Proverb

“The best fighter is never angry.”
Lao Tzu

“The greatest remedy for anger is delay.”
Thomas Paine, Founding Father of the United States

“In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.”
Rene Descartes

“But in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically.”
Rene Descartes

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty
Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray

‘I pay no attention to anybody’s praise or blame.  I simply follow my own feelings’
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

THEOCRACY TO DEMOCRACY:

“Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad or that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us”
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.”
Christopher Hitchens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sEcBzxoMB8

“Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.”Albert Camus

“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”
Vladimir Ilich Lenin

“In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.”
ThomasStephen Szasz, Law Liberty and Psychiatry https://www.szasz.com/

“Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
Abraham Lincoln

“…I say, that Power must never be trusted without a check.”
John Adams, Adams-Jefferson Letters

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Winston S. Churchill

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
(Speech in House of Commons, 11 November 1947)” Winston S. Churchill Speaks: Collected Speeches in Peace and War, 1897-1963

“Democracy is in the blood of the Muslims, who look upon complete equality of mankind, and believe in fraternity, equality, and liberty.” Muhammad Ali Jinnah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAx3cxLVAI0

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
The Mahatma Gandhi

“Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.”
Bertrand Russell

“I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.”
Paul Krugman https://twitter.com/NYTimeskrugman

“We do not want to live in a Theocracy.  We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives”
Robert Reich https://twitter.com/RBReich

“We cannot build foundations of a state without Rule of Law”
Mahmoud Abbas https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/mahmoud-abbas

“Lack of rule of law is the main reason Pakistan could not join the ranks of progressive nations.”
Imran Khan https://twitter.com/ImranKhanPTI

ANTI-WAR:

“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. This 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 clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
George Orwell

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. ”
Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire https://twitter.com/hashtag/arundhatiroy

“Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.”
Thomas Jefferson – Founding Father United States of America   and

“If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”

“My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.” –
George Washington  first President of the United States (1789–97)

“Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.”
Benjamin Franklin – Founding Father United States of America   and

“A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.”  and

“I hope….that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats…”

“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Russian https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/…/solzhenitsyn-bio.html

“The next war … may well bury Western civilization forever.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“The chain reaction of evil–wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We have guided missiles and misguided men.” –
Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

“War is the greatest plague that can affect humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.”
Martin Luther King Jr.

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind”
Albert Einstein

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”.
Albert Einstein

“It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
Albert Einstein

“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”
George Orwell

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.” –
George Orwell

“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
George Orwell

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

“There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.” –
Dwight D. Eisenhower

ABUSE OF POWER:

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
Lord Acton

“Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”
Lord Acton

“By curious accident of history and geography, the world’s major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions.  They’re a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf.”

Professor Noam Chomsky https://twitter.com/daily_chomsky?lang=en

https://www.alternet.org/world/noam-chomsky-americas-empire-chaos

“Freedom and Pluralism of the media are crucial for a pluralist society in a member state respectful of the common values on which the Union (EU) is founded”  Financial Times 5th January 2016 (Mr Timmermans wrote in one of the letters delivered on the 3oth December 2015 and seen by the Financial Times. (Duncan Robinson and Peter Spiegel, Brussels.  Henry Foy Warsaw).

“Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.” -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Knowledge is power.” – Francis Bacon

“In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it.” Leo Tolstoy.

“The steps of power are often steps on sand”. Edward Counsel, Maxims

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”. Henry Kissinger

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.” Edmund Burke

PEACE:

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
The Mahatma Gandhi

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” –
The Mahatma Gandhi

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
Martin Luther King Jr, Strength to Love

“The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor.”
Ronald Reagan  (say it often enough and US has come to believe the lies)

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
Virginia Woolf

John Hume SDLP – Peace Process to Good Friday Agreement; an architect of Peace in troubled Northern Ireland spoke of “Diversity in Unity” makes this current article about the fall-out of Christians (their birthplace being in the East) an interesting perspective. http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/culture/lebanons-female-pastor-and-her-struggle-to-keep-the-middle-east-a-land-of-diversity_37484

Links:  The Original Child by Cistercian Monk Thomas Merton thehealingprojectwebcast.blogspot.com/…/remembering-hiroshima-thom..

The Russell–Einstein Manifesto was issued in London on 9 July 1955 by Bertrand Russell in the midst of the Cold War. It highlighted the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and called for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict.  https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/news/2015/jul/9/russelleinstein-manifesto/

The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) or Belfast Agreement (Irish: Comhaontú Bhéal Feirste or Comhaontú Aoine an Chéasta; Ulster-Scots: Bilfawst Greeance or Guid Friday Greeance) was a major political development in the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s.  https://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/attached_files/Pdf%20files/NIPeaceAgreement.pdf

Tomas Young veteran of Iraq Afghanistan wars; his dying letter to George Bush and Dick Cheyne.  The content of this letter should never be forgotten.  https://www.commondreams.org/views/…/tomas-youngs-last-letter-bush-cheney

DETENTE:

“Detente is a readiness to resolve difference and conflicts not by force, not by threats and sabre-rattling, but by peaceful means, at the conference table.”As quoted in Brezhnev Reconsidered (2002)by Edwin Bacon, Mark Sandle, p. 99   https://coldwarhc.blogspot.com/p/detente.html

Happy New Year 2016

Michelle Clarke