Nonviolence Quotes Page 2

I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.

I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

This may well be mankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community.

I became a vegetarian out of compassion for animals and to live as healthy as possible. I realized soon after that I was truly concerned with nonviolent consumption and my own health, a vegan diet was the best decision.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

In a world where change is inevitable and continuous, the need to achieve that change without violence is essential for survival.

Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years.

He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.

Veganism is not about giving anything up or losing anything;

it is about gaining the peace within yourself that comes from embracing nonviolence and refusing to participate in the exploitation of the vulnerable

The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things 'because we're supposed to.

Martin Luther King taught us all nonviolence.

I was told to extend nonviolence to the mother and her calf.

The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed. . . . The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

We're not really pacifists, we're nonviolent soldiers.

Love cannot remain by itself - it has no meaning.

Love has to be put into action and that action is service.

You can have no influence over those for whom you have underlying contempt.

Veganism is not a limitation in any way;

it's an expansion of your love, your commitment to nonviolence, and your belief in justice for all.

I think art is inherently nonviolent and it actually occupies your mind with creation rather than destruction.

An act of violence against any innocent person eludes moral justification, disgraces the millions of Americans and people throughout the world who have united in peaceful protest against police brutality, and dishonors our proud inheritance of nonviolent resistance.

I learnt the lesson on nonviolence from my wife, when I tried to bend her to my will. Her determined resistance to my will on the one hand, and her quiet submission to the suffering my stupidity involved on the other, ultimately made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity in thinking that I was born to rule over her.

Regardless of our many differences, we all have the same needs.

What differs is the strategy for fulfilling these needs.

I ran because I became convinced after King was shot and killed, and Martin Luther King was one of the great heroes of my life, that politics is not perfect but it's the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live. If we don't like how we live, we can participate in the perfect most revolutionary act in a democracy, it's called voting.

The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide.

The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.

Anger is a signal that you're distracted by judgmental or punitive thinking, and that some precious need of yours is being ignored.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force.

When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.

The weak can never forgive.

I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another.

We cannot be fearful all the time; we have to rise above our fear, whatever is to happen to us, however our conditions may challenge us. To be fearless is a decision that one must make. And this fearlessness becomes the fundamental ground of nonviolence.

The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well with others.

. . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

When our communication supports compassionate giving and receiving, happiness replaces violence and grieving.

The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

All who affirm the use of violence admit it is only a means to achieve justice and peace. But peace and justice are nonviolence...the final end of history. Those who abandon nonviolence have no sense of history. Rathy they are bypassing history, freezing history, betraying history.

Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.