Notable Peace & Justice Activists Posters “Ar...-Az...-”
with curriculum enrichment resources for social studies classrooms, teachers, home schoolers, offices.

Yasser Arafat
Klas Pontus Arnoldson
Arthur Ashe
Emperor Ashoka

Tobias Michael Carel Asser
Saint Francis of Assisi
Mary Astell

Klas Pontus Arnoldson
b. 10-27-1844; Sweden
d. 2-20-1916

Author, journalist, politician, and committed pacifist Klas Arnoldson received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1908 as a founding member and first chairman of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society.

Arthur Ashe
b. 7-10-1943; Richmond, VA
d. 2-6-1993; NYC

Arthur Ashe, a professional tennis player, won three Grand Slam titles, and made great effort to further social causes.

Emperor Ashoka
flourished - 304-232 BC; India

Ashoka embraced Buddhism after witnessing the destruction and mass deaths he caused in wars of conquest. He spread Buddhism across Asia and established monuments marking several significant sites in the life of Gautama Buddha. He is considered just after Gautama in the history of Buddhism.

Ashoka is known today as a devotee of ahimsa (nonviolence), love, truth, tolerance, vegetarianism, and a philanthropic administrator.

St. Francis of Assisi with Scenes from His Life, Giclee Print

Saint Francis of Assisi
b. 9-26-1181; Assisi, Italy
d. 10-3-1226; Assisi

Saint Francis of Assisi, Roman Catholic friar and the founder of the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans), is known as the patron saint of animals, birds, and the environment and noted for his aestic lifestyle.

As a young man Francis had a carefree life as the son of a wealthy family which lead to a disillusionment toward the complications of the world. He believed commoners should be able to pray to God in their own language and is considered the first Italian poet by literary critics.

• Saint Francis of Assisi: A Life of Joy by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
• Francis and Clare: The Complete Works (Classics of Western Spirituality
• St. Francis Prayer - Mother Teresa poster

Mary Astell
b. 11-12-1666; Newcastle upon Tyne, England
d. 5-11-1731; breast cancer

Considered the first English feminist, author Mary Astell advocated an education for women that would extend their choices beyond being only either a mother, or a nun.

Astell's best known books, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest (1694) and A Serious Proposal, Part II (1697), were outlines of a new type of institution, a protected environment, for women to assist in providing women with both religious and secular education.

Mary Astell quotes ~
• “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?”
• “Women are not so well united as to form an Insurrection. They are for the most part wise enough to love their chains, and to discern how becomingly they fit.”

Miguel Ángel Asturias
b. 10-19-1899; Guatamala City, Guatemala
d. 6-9-1974; Madrid

Tobias Michael Carel Asser
b. 4-28-1838; Amsterdam, The Netherlands
d. 7-29-1913

Tobias Michael Carel Asser, a Dutch jurist and worker for world peace, was the initiator of the International Conferences of Private Law in The Hague for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, 1911.

Hubertine Auclert
b. 4-10-1848; Auvergne, France
d. 8-4-1914

Hubertine Auclert was a feminist and a campaigner for women's suffrage as well as demanding that women be given the right to run for public office, claiming that the unfair laws would never have been passed had the views of female legislators been heard.

Sri Aurobindo
née Aurobindo Ghose
b. 8-15-1872; Calcutta (now Kolkata), India
d. 12-5-1950

Sri Aurobindo is best remembered today as a philosopher, yogi, and guru (teacher) for his vision of human progress and spiritual evolution. As a young man he joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and became one of its most important leaders. When Gandhi asked him to become the spiritual leader of India, he declined, saying he was concerned for the whole world.

His teaching are expressed in the founding of Auroville “an international township endorsed by UNESCO to further human unity near the town of Pondicherry, which was to be a place ‘where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities’”.

FYI - Margaret Wilson, the daughter of Woodrow Wilson, visited Pondicherry in 1938 and lived there for the rest of her life.

Sri Aurobindo quotes ~
• “Live within; be not shaken by outward happenings.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “Inspiration is a slender river of brightness leaping from a vast and eternal knowledge, it exceeds reason more perfectly than reason exceeds the knowledge of the senses.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “If thy aim be great and thy means small, still act; for by action alone these can increase to thee.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body? This first we ought to determine.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “Even when one has climbed up into those levels of bliss where pain vanishes, it still survives disguised as intolerable ecstasy.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “There are two allied powers in man; knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is so much of the truth seen in a distorted medium as the mind arrives at by groping, wisdom what the eye of divine vision sees in the spirit.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.” ~ Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)
• “What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.” ~ Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)
• “The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality.” ~ A Defense of Indian Culture, as quoted in The Vision of India (1949) by Sisirkumar Mitra
• “Even soul-force, when it is effective, destroys. Only those who have used it with eyes open, know how much more destructive it can be than the sword and the cannon; and only those who do not limit their view to the act and its immediate results, can see how tremendous are its after-effects, how much is eventually destroyed and with that much all the life that depended upon it and fed upon it. Evil cannot perish without the destruction of much that lives by the evil, and it is no less destruction even if we personally are saved the pain of a sensational act of violence.” ~ Essays on the Gita
• “We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.” ~ New Lamps for Old (1893)
• “Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.” ~ New Lamps for Old (1893)
• “I waited day and night for the voice of God within me, to know what He had to say to me, to learn what I had to do. In this seclusion the earliest realisation, the first lesson came to me. . . . and what He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion and desire, to do work for Him without the demand for fruit, to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure, yet not to do His work negligently. I realised what the Hindu religion meant. We speak often of the Hindu religion, of the Sanatan Dharma, but few of us really know what that religion is. Other religions are preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatan Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as lived.” ~ The Uttarpara Address (1909)