Quotes about Coexistence

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

The polarization that characterizes so much of American life is risky business in a church congregation, but especially so in a monastic community. The person you're quick to label and dismiss as a racist, a homophobe, a queer, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a bigoted conservative or bleeding-heart liberal is also a person you're committed to live, work, pray, and dine with for the rest of your life.

There is a science of war, but how strange that there isn't a science of peace. There are colleges of war; why can't we study peace?

Peace is more than just an absence of war. True peace is justice, true peace is freedom, and true peace dictates the recognition of human rights.

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war.

War and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.

There are a mix of good and bad people everywhere, be it Punjab, Delhi or Haryana.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.

Involuntary organizations ought to be tolerant, but voluntary organizations, so far as the fundamental purpose of their existence is concerned, must be intolerant or else cease to exist.

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.

When has religion ever been unifying? Religion has introduced many wars in this world, enough bloodshed and violence.

Nations with nations mix'd confus'dly die, and lost in one promiscuous carnage lie.