When you are special to a cat, you are special indeed, she brings to you the gift of her preference of you, the sight of you, the sound of your voice, the touch of your hand.- Lester B. Pearson
We must keep on trying to solve problems, one by one, stage by stage, if not on the basis of confidence and cooperation, at least on that of mutual toleration and self-interest.
We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side. Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction.
We are all descendants of Adam, and we are all products of racial miscegenation.
Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.
True there has been more talk of peace since 1945 than, I should think, at any other time in history. At least we hear more and read more about it because man's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions.
Today the predatory state, or the predatory group of states, with power of total destruction, is no more to be tolerated than the predatory individual.
Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.
The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war.
The scientific and technological discoveries that have made war so infinitely more terrible for us are part of the same process that has knit us all so much more closely together.
The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states.
The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.
The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Of all our dreams today there is none more important - or so hard to realise - than that of peace in the world. May we never lose our faith in it or our resolve to do everything that can be done to convert it one day into reality.
