Prayers for Peace

A Christian Prayer for Peace

But I say to you that hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons and daughters of God.

A Native American Prayer for Peace

O Great Spirit of our Ancestors... Give us the wisdom to teach our children to love, to respect, and to be kind to each other so that they may grow with peace in mind. Let us learn to share all the good things that you provide for us on this Earth.

A Muslim Prayer for Peace

In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. Praise be to the Lord of the Universe who has created us and made us into tribes and nations that we may know each other, not that we may despise each other.

A Jewish Prayer for Peace

Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, that we may walk the paths of the Most High. And we shall beat our swords into plowshares, and our spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore. And none shall be afraid.

A Buddhist Prayer for Peace

May all beings everywhere plagued with sufferings of body and mind quickly be freed from their illness. May those frightened cease to be afraid, and may those bound be free. May the powerless find power, and may people think of befriending one another.

A Hindu Prayer for Peace

O God, lead us from the unreal to the Real. O God, lead us from darkness to light. O God, lead us from death to immortality. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti unto all.

A Jainist Prayer for Peace

Do not injure any living being. This is the eternal, perennial, and unalterable way of spiritual life. Forgive do I creatures all, and let all creatures forgive me. Unto all have I amity, and unto none enmity.

A Baha'i Prayer for Peace

Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity... be a lamp unto those who walk in darkness and a home to the stranger. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be a breath of life to the body of humankind, a dew to the soil of the human heart, and a fruit upon the tree of humility.

A Sikh Prayer for Peace

We attain God when we love, and only that victory endures in consequences of which no one is defeated.

A Zoroastrian Prayer for Peace

We pray to God to eradicate all the misery in the world: that understanding triumph over ignorance, that generosity triumph over indifference, that trust triumph over contempt, and that truth triumph over falsehood.

A Shinto Prayer for Peace

Although the people living across the ocean surrounding us, I believe all are our brothers and sisters, Why are there constant troubles in this world? Why do winds and waves rise in the oceans surrounding us? I only earnestly wish that the wind will soon puff away all the clouds which are hanging over the tops of mountains.

Know in your Heart that You Can Pray for Peace AND Support and Encourage the Men and Women Serving in our Armed Forces and the Families they've Left Behind. At the Same Time, as Citizens and Voters, We the People Need to Make Sure Our Elected Officials Send our Armed Forces Only When It is Necessary and Justified.

Origins of the Peace Symbol

It was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist and graduate of the Royal College of Arts in London, England. He showed his preliminary sketches to a small group of people in the Peace News office in North London and to the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, one of several smaller organizations that came together to set up the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The Direct Action Committee had already planned what was to be the first major anti-nuclear march, from London to Aldermaston, where British nuclear weapons were and still are manufactured. It was on that march, over the 1958 Easter weekend, that the symbol first appeared in public.

What does it mean? Gerald Holtom, a conscientious objector who had worked on a farm in England during World War Two, explained that the symbol incorporated the semaphore letters N(uclear) and D(isarmament).

D N

He later wrote to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, explaining the genesis of his idea in greater, more personal depth:I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.

The symbol almost at once crossed the Atlantic. Bayard Rustin, a close associate of Martin Luther King had come over from the US in order to take part in that first Aldermaston March. He took the symbol back to the United States where it was used on civil rights marches. Later it appeared on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and was even seen daubed in protest on their helmets by American GIs.

Simpler to draw than the Picasso peace dove, it became known, first in the US and then round the world as the peace symbol. It appeared on the walls of Prague when the Soviet tanks invaded in 1968, on the Berlin Wall, in Sarajevo and Belgrade, on the graves of the victims of military dictators from the Greek Colonels to the Argentinian junta, and most recently in East Timor. There have been claims that the symbol has older, occult or anti-Christian associations. In South Africa, under the apartheid regime, there was an official attempt to ban it. Various far-right and fundamentalist American groups have also spread the idea of Satanic associations or condemned it as a Communist sign.

Although specifically designed for the anti-nuclear movement it has quite deliberately never been copyrighted. No one has to pay or to seek permission before they use it. A symbol of freedom, it is free for all.