Gene Sharp Quotes

#1. Some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political, or military control over the country.

Gene Sharp

#2. Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.

Gene Sharp

#3. It's a nonsense assumption that you can get rid of terrorism with war. Terrorism is taking the lives of innocent people to gain your objective. War is basically the same thing on a larger scale.

Gene Sharp

#4. Whatever promises offered by dictators in any negotiated settlement, no one should ever forget that the dictators may promise anything to secure submission from their democratic opponents, and then brazenly violate those same agreements.

Gene Sharp

#5. Nonviolent struggle is the most powerful means available to those struggling for freedom.

Gene Sharp

#6. Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are.

Gene Sharp

#7. You have a chance of learning
if you want to and youre not arrogant.

Gene Sharp

#8. So, he reasoned, if you can identify the sources of a government's power - people working in civil service, police and judges, even the army - then you know what a dictatorship depends on for its existence.

Gene Sharp

#9. Contrary to popular opinion, even totalitarian dictatorships are dependent on the population and the societies they rule.

Gene Sharp

#10. That is straight out of Gandhi. If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble. ... If you fight with violence, you are fighting with your enemy's best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.

Gene Sharp

#11. The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.

Gene Sharp

#12. By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.

Gene Sharp

#13. The foreign states may become actively involved for positive purposes only if and when the internal resistance movement has already begun shaking the dictatorship, having thereby focused international attention on the brutal nature of the regime.

Gene Sharp

#14. The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic,and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression.

Gene Sharp

#15. There should be no romanticism that international public opinion or even international diplomatic and economic pressure can defeat a coup without determined and strong defense by the attacked society itself

Gene Sharp

#16. As soon as you choose to fight with violence you're choosing to fight against your opponents best weapons and you have to be smarter than that,

Gene Sharp