Objector Quotes

They asked if I knew what 'conscientious objector' meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object. ~ Malcolm X

No thanky-you; you can't overcome hatred with more hatred. Force can kill the liar but not the lie, the hater but not the hate, and the violent but not the violence. Hate begets hate, violence begets violence, and war begets war. ~ Joss Sheldon

How many people volunteer for an army and then claim conscientious objector status? ~ John Scalzi

They see it as perfectly normal for me to sit beside Victoria's body for hours on end, telling her how much I love her and all the things I meant to inform her of but never got around to. How her grandfather Jack was a conscientious objector in the Second World War, but did not want to be separated from his mates, and so became an ambulance officer. How Grandma Sheila recalls him waking from a frequent dream of the trenches, always crying out, "I can't reach him, I can't reach him." That he was a brave man who did the best he could within his own principles. Of how he would have loved her and been so proud of her. Asking Vic to tell Jack we miss him. ~ Linda Collins

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. ~ John F. Kennedy

But, above all, it will confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion, by showing that all the objections urged against them may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector. ~ Immanuel Kant

For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous impulses.

While we're on the subject of the horrors of war, and humanity's most poisonous and least charitable attributes, let me not forget to mention Barbara Bush (that would be former First Lady and presidential mother as opposed to W's liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter. I'm sorry, that's not fair. I've no idea if she smokes.) When the administration censored images of the flag-draped coffins of the young men and women being killed in Iraq - purportedly to respect "the privacy of the families" and not to minimize and cover up the true nature and consequences of the war - the family matriarch expressed her support for what was ultimately her son's decision by saying on Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something ~ David Rakoff

The conscientious objector is a revoultionary. On deciding to disobey the law he sacrifices his personal interests to the most important cause of working for the betterment of society. ~ Albert Einstein

Science probes; it does not prove. Imagine Newton's reaction to an objector of his law of gravity who argued that he could not establish a universal law because he had not observed every falling apple, much less proved the law of gravity - there might, after all, be an apple that levitates! Why should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? ~ Robert M. Pirsig

It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns. ~ Harold Pinter

Where do all the labyrinths of error in the world come from [the objector will continue], if not from the fact that when men follow their own minds they land in vanity and lies? So ~ John Calvin

God is British to the bone, and every fellow here knows it. You can't exploit him to save yourself, you blaspheming cadaverous-prig; you disgusting shambles of porcelain-skin, unwholesome-fat and puny-bones. Your blatant disregard for God's word shan't earn you any favours here! ~ Joss Sheldon

It was the fact that I didn't want to kill anyone. I wasn't put on this earth to murder my fellow man. I'd grown up with violence - can't you see that? I can't bear it. ~ John Boyne

By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself. ~ Richard Dawkins

If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play. ~ Marge Piercy

A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything. ~ Ross Macdonald

Frank had turned into a giant eagle to fly to Delos, but Leo hitched a ride with Hazel on Arion's back. No offense to Frank, but after the fiasco at Fort Sumter, Leo had become a conscientious objector to riding giant eagles. He had a one hundred percent failure rate. They found the island deserted, maybe because the seas were too choppy for the tourist boats. The windswept hills were barren except for rocks, grass, and wildflowers - and, of course, a bunch of crumbling temples. The rubble was probably very impressive, but ever since Olympia, Leo had been on ancient ruins overload. He was so done with white marble columns. He wanted to get back to the U.S., where the oldest buildings were the public schools and Ye Olde McDonald's. ~ Rick Riordan

At the vital point of truth, we all become a conscientious objector. ~ Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall