Petra Kelly Quotes

Violent revolutions usually only mean a change of personnel at the top.

Like the mind-set that places men above women, whites above blacks, and rich above poor, the mentality that places humans above nature is a dysfunctional delusion.

These missiles [Cruise and Pershing II] represent a new generation of missiles whose deployment will help give NATO first-strike capability. With this first-strike strategy, the West believes it could attack Russian military installations with such effectiveness that serious retaliation would be impossible.

I belong to the initiators of the ... and we had repeatedly also asked the dismantling of the SS-20 but we did not connect them - that was the difference. We didn't connect them because we felt that this was a step taken, an unnecessary step by the American side and added to by the NATO member countries.

Power over must be replaced by shared power, by the power to do things, by the discovery of our own strength as opposed to a passive receiving of power exercised by others, often in our name.

Our motto is, 'Be gentle and subversive.'

The profound political changes we need in order to heal our planet will not come about through fragmented problem solving or intellectual analyses that overlook the deepest yearnings and intuitions of the heart ... As we begin to cultivate a rich inner life and experience our connection with all life, we realize how little of what society tells us we need is actually important for our well-being ... Green politics must address the spiritual vacuum of industrial society.

The transformation of forests into deserts, fertile earth into sunbaked concrete, and running rivers into silted floodwaters show that only through care for the environment can the livelihoods of those most dependent on it be sustained. We cannot allow economic and environmental concerns to be played off against each other.

The vision I see is not only a movement of direct democracy, of self- and co-determination and non-violence, but a movement in which politics means the power to love and the power to feel united on the spaceship Earth ...

Time and time again we forget all too easily that nonviolent action embraces a wide and imaginative range of behavior which can always be stepped up.

We are at a point in human evolution when human solidarity on a global scale is absolutely vital for the survival of the human species. That means understanding that ... we are all co-inhabitants of this planet.

We call upon people everywhere to work for peace, to forget the quiet comfort of their homes, to leave behind their fears and feeling of powerlessness, their privileges and possessions, and join us as active participants and co-workers for peace.

An industrial system predicated on the delusion of limitless expansion will, in time, consume its own basis of support.

I have hope for the world, although it is ten minutes before Doomsday. Women all over the world are rising up and infusing the anti-nuclear and peace movements with a vitality and creativity never seen before.

Practically every violent conflict or social change has proved that violence unleashes violence in return.

Peace is not just the absence of mass destruction, but a positive internal and external condition in which people are free so that they can grow to their full potential.

Uranium is the raw material of a power-elite who has taken Mother Earth's every living creature hostage.

European peace movement felt that the deployment of these missiles on European soil, on German soil would be a very great danger towards the Soviet Union in that those missiles could reach the Soviet Union, make it vulnerable within five to six minutes, that it could surgical strikes, strikes into the military infrastructure and that a strike into the military infrastructure could cause in fact World War III, an atomic world war and that this could also be used for first strike, for surgical search, first strike into the Soviet Union.

Militarism is in direct competition with people's needs for food, health care, and environmental protection.