Global Youth Debates Theme for 2014-15: "Global Peace and Security"

Resources to get started:
Please make sure you share your resources via our Global Youth Debates Diigo Group.

We also encourage all students and teachers to join the Collaboration (Edmodo group) and share ideas and start discussion based on the Debate theme and topic.

READ MORE about the importance or RESEARCH when debating into action with Global Youth Debates.

DEBATE TOPICS
Topic 2: February-June 2015
"For global peace and security censorship of the Internet does more harm than good"
Topic 1: September-October 2014
"Revolution is a justifiable means to global peace and security."
Read more.
Interesting Quotes

Today, peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to cooperation and common creativity among countries and nations. Peace is movement towards globality and universality of civilization. Never before has the idea that peace is indivisible been so true as it is now. Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences. And, ideally, peace means the absence of violence. It is an ethical value.
Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction.
  • Bernard Baruch, Address to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (14 June 1946)

If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
  • Moshe Dayan, As quoted in Newsweek (17 October 1977)

Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. You cannot subjugate a nation forcibly unless you wipe out every man, woman, and child. Unless you wish to use such drastic measures, you must find a way of settling your disputes without resort to arms.
  • Albert Einstein, in a speech to the New History Society (14 December 1930), reprinted in "Militant Pacifism" in Cosmic Religion (1931). Also found in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice, p. 158.

If we are to reach real peace in this world and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with children; and if they will grow up in their natural innocence, we won’t have to struggle, we won’t have to pass fruitless idle resolutions. But we shall go from love to love and peace to peace, until at last all the corners of the world are covered with that peace and love for which, consciously or unconsciously, the whole world is hungering.
  • Mahatma Gandhi Young India (19 November 1931, p. 361)

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
  • Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters (1987), "Introduction: Thinkability"

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
  • Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters (1987), "Introduction: Thinkability"

War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with…. But it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.
  • Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the next War (1911), Chapter I.

Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.
  • Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles.

He who did well in war just earns the right
To begin doing well in peace.
  • Robert Browning, Luria, Act II, line 354.

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.
  • Don DeLillo, End Zone ch.16, (1972)

There never was a good war or a bad peace.
  • Benjamin Franklin, letter to Quincy. Sept. 11, 1773.

There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.
  • Bonar Law. Speech before the Great War. Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 841-60.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.
  • George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)