Colman McCarthy
Colman McCarthy
Colman McCarthy, an American journalist, teacher, lecturer, pacifist, progressive, an anarchist, and long-time peace activist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. From 1969 to 1997, he wrote columns for The Washington Post. His topics ranged from politics, religion, health, and sports to education, poverty, and peacemaking. Washingtonian magazine called him "the liberal conscience of The Washington Post." Smithsonian magazine said he is "a man of profound spiritual awareness." He has written for The New Yorker, The Nation,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
CountryUnited States of America
Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.
Give peace a chance, yes, but why not get serious and give it a place in the curriculum: peace courses in every school, every grade, every nation. Unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence.
The earth is too small a star and we too brief a visitor upon it for anything to matter more than the struggle for peace.
The students I've been with these twenty years are looking for a world where it becomes a little easier to love and a lot harder to hate, where learning nonviolence means that we dedicate our hearts, minds, time, and money to a commitment that the force of love, the force of truth, the force of justice, and the force of organized resistance to corrupt power are seen as sane and the force of fists, guns, armies, and bombs insane.
It's too easy only to blame the militarists, racists, sexists and other pushers of violence for the mess we're in. What is harder is self-examination, moving beyond caring by looking inward to ask the personal question: What more should I be doing everyday to bring about a peace and justice based world, whether across the ocean or across the living room?
Peace is the result of love, and if love were easy we'd all be good at it.
Wars aren't stopped by fighting wars, any more than you can fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. You fight violence with nonviolence.
It's better to build a peaceful child than re-build a violent adult.
The most revolutionary thing anybody can do is to raise good, honest and generous children who will question the answers of people who say the answer is violence. That's what the schools should be doing.
Breaking America's oil addiction would not lead to a future of sackcloth and ashes.
I'd rather teach peace.
Unless we teach our children peace, somebody else will teach them violence.
The failure of love, that's what all laws are really.
Warmaking doesn't stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago.