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"Nicholson Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open letter he wrote to the British people on 3 July 1940. "Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans," wrote the Mahatma. "I want you to fight Nazism without arms." He went on to say: "Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." I must say that everything in me declines to be addressed in that tone of voice."
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Exlpore more Pacifism quotes
"Actual violence has no attraction for me at all."
"Ez for war I call it murder - There you hev it plain and flat I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment for that."
"If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm."
"If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows - pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music... That would be so much cheaper than bombs."
"I have never been attracted to any kind of violence."
"But strength doesn't always mean brute force. You don't have to kick ass to be a fighter. Violence doesn't equal strength. Lead your army by example. There's a better answer to all this. War isn't going to solve anything, but it will tear our two worlds apart, and there will be casualties, including humans. There's nothing heroic about this war. It will lead to a destruction unlike anything you or I have ever seen."
Explore more quotes by Christopher Hitchens
"Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible."
"If the Bahreini royal family can have an embassy, a state, and a seat at the UN, why should the twenty-five million Kurds not have a claim to autonomy? The alleviation of their suffering and the assertion of their self-government is one of the few unarguable benefits of regime change in Iraq. It is not a position from which any moral retreat would be allowable."
"The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate."
"How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape."
"The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has-from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness."
"Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar."
"Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well."
"Forget it. Never explain, never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't."
"You don't so much as become an atheist as find out that's what you are. There's no moment of conversion. You don't suddenly think 'I don't believe this anymore.' You essentially find you don't believe it."
"It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed."
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