Pacifism

Belief in or advocacy of peaceful methods as feasible and desirable alternatives to war; (espousal or advocacy of) a group of doctrines which reject war and every form of violent action as a means of solving disputes, esp. in international affairs. Also: advocacy of a peaceful policy or rejection of war in a particular instance.

1902 Proc. 10th Universal Peace Congr. 74

“M. Emile Arnaud... Speaking at length, in French,..said:... The negative programme of Pacifism is anti-War-ism.”

1915 National Rev. Mar. 54

"The greatest war in history is now being fought in the cause of Pacifism."

1919 George Bernard Shaw
Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War p. xviii

“There was only one virtue, pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.”

1935 Fellowship Mar. 3/1

“Pacifism does not renounce the struggle, but carries it on with the more effective weapons of non-violence.”

1941 Aldous Leonard Huxley
Letters 17 Nov. (1969) 470

"In war time, it would seem, psychological conditions are such that the application of pacifism to politics is for all practical purposes impossible."

1957 Alan John Percivale Taylor
Trouble Makers ii. 51

“Even Bright, who was sometimes nearer to pacifism, did not plead ‘that this country should remain without adequate and scientific means of defence’.”

1960 Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden
Einstein on Peace Introd. p. ix,

“He [sc. Einstein] himself once said that his pacifism was not derived from any intellectual theory but was based on his deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.”

1999 Dayton (Ohio) Daily News (Nexis) 23 July,

“He has stood for a pacifism toward Milosevic that has long been discredited by the latter's brutality and refusal to yield to anything but force.”