The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship

WAR AND PEACE

We cannot continue in this paralyzing mistrust. If we want to work out way out of the desperate situation in which we find ourselves another spirit must enter into the people. It can only come if the awareness of its necessity suffices to give us strength to believe in its coming. We must presuppose the awareness of this need in all peoples who have suffered along with us. We must approach them in the spirit that we are human beings, all of us, and that we feel ourselves fitted to feel with each other; to think and to will together in the same way. (On Nuclear War and Peace, p. 178)

The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics…Now we must re-discover the fact that we – all together – are human beings, and that we must strive to concede to each other what moral capacity we have. Only in this way can we begin to believe that in other peoples as well as in ourselves there will arise the need for a new spirit, which can be the beginning of a feeling of mutual trustworthiness towards each other. The spirit is a mighty force for transforming things.(On Nuclear War And Peace, p. 178)

That the reign of peace will eventually come to pass…has been discounted as “utopian,” but the situation today is such that it must in one way or another become reality if humanity is not to perish. (On Nuclear War And Peace p. 195)

We tolerate mass-killing in wartime – about 20 million people died in the second world war – just as we tolerate the destruction by atomic bombing of whole towns and the populations…When we admit to ourselves that they were the direct results of an act of inhumanity, our admission is qualified by the reflection that “war is war” and there is nothing to be done about it. In so resigning ourselves, without any further resistance, we ourselves become guilty of inhumanity. The important thing is that we should one and all acknowledge that we have been guilty of this inhumanity. The horror of that avowal must needs arouse everyone of us from our torpor, and compel us to hope and work with all our strength for the coming of an age when war will no longer exist. (On Nuclear War And Peace, p. 197)

As one who tries to remain youthful in his thinking and feeling, I have struggled against facts and experience on behalf of belief in the good and the true. At the present time when violence, clothed in life, dominates the world more cruelly than it ever has before, I still remain convinced that truth, love, peaceableness, meekness, and kindness are the violence which can master all other violence. The world will be theirs as soon as ever a sufficient number of men with purity of heart, with strength, and with perseverance, think and live out the thoughts of love and truth, of meekness and peaceableness. (Memoirs of Childhood and Youth.)