Top 100 Nonviolent Quotes
#1. Educators committed to engaging in the long-term, often difficult work of strengthening their relationships with colleagues, students and parents and expanding their opportunities for personal growth will find Nonviolent Communication to be an invaluable tool.
Ron Rubin
#2. [Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#3. I think it is now widely understood that the so-called "War on Drugs" has largely been a failure. Too many people have developed criminal records for smoking marijuana. Too many people have gone to jail for nonviolent crimes. So I think it's important for us to rethink the war on drugs.
Bernie Sanders
#4. Nonviolent non-co-operation, I am convinced, is a sacred duty at times.
Mahatma Gandhi
#5. Time and time again we forget all too easily that nonviolent action embraces a wide and imaginative range of behavior which can always be stepped up.
Petra Kelly
#6. A nonviolent occupation is that occupation which is fundamentally free from violence and which involves no exploitation or envy of others.
Mahatma Gandhi
#7. It is nonviolent non-co-operation which evokes the highest spirit of self-sacrifice that will wean one from the error of one's ways.
Mahatma Gandhi
#8. If we are nonviolent through and through, our nonviolence would have been self-evident.
Mahatma Gandhi
#9. My position has always been, along with many other people, that any differences be resolved in a nonviolent way.
Jimmy Carter
#10. I support this proposal and agree with this great and important initiative to abolish militarism and war. I will continue to speak out for an end to the institution of militarism and war and for institutions built on international law and human rights and nonviolent conflict resolution.
Mairead Corrigan
#11. Nonviolent action without the co-operation of the heart and the head cannot produce the intended result.
Mahatma Gandhi
#12. A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
Barbara Deming
#13. Meditation is a totally nonviolent, nonaggressive occupation.
Pema Chodron
#14. The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.
A.J. Muste
#15. The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
Bertrand Russell
#16. Nonviolence aims at doing no harm to living being. Compassion aims at doing good to all being.
Amit Ray
#17. Finally, this case should serve as yet another reminder of just how dangerous and volatile these police home invasions really are, and why we should stop using them to serve search warrants for nonviolent crimes. They offer no margin for error.
Radley Balko
#18. We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#19. We know we cannot be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them
exploiting animals in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food.
Cesar Chavez
#20. 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.
Davey Havok
#21. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well with others.
Cesar Chavez
#22. The power of nonviolent resistance can only come from honest working of the constructive programme.
Mahatma Gandhi
#23. The Congress fights not with violent but with nonviolent means, however imperfect, however crude the nonviolence may be.
Mahatma Gandhi
#24. I must personally say that I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations.
Jerry Falwell
#25. When you do something in a nonviolent way, people will die and there will be casualties. But you're taking a different point of view that has a power.
Tom Shadyac
#26. We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.
Malcolm X
#27. The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.
Noam Chomsky
#28. Civil disobedience has almost always been about expression. Generally, it's nonviolent, as defined by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.
Marvin Ammori
#29. nonviolent force is a moral argument. The lesson is that if the nonviolent side can be led to violence, they have lost the argument and they are destroyed.
Mark Kurlansky
#30. It didn't help when Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael made his notorious comment to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: "The position of women in SNCC is prone.
Ariel Levy
#31. The true democrat is he who with purely nonviolent means defends his liberty and, therefore, his country's and ultimately that of the whole of mankind.
Mahatma Gandhi
#32. The nation cannot be kept on the nonviolent path by violence.
Mahatma Gandhi
#33. By nonviolent resistance, the Negro can also enlist all men of good will in his struggle for equality.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#34. Loving your enemy. Doing good things for evil people. Never taking vengeance. Responding to violence with nonviolent love - even if it brings suffering. These are not options, but the primary character traits of those who claim to follow a crucified God.
Preston Sprinkle
#35. Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#36. Some 8,000 nonviolent Occupy protesters were arrested across the nation. Not one banker or investor went to jail for causing the 2008 financial meltdown. The disparity of justice mirrored the disparity in incomes and the disparity in power.
Chris Hedges
#37. Nonviolent non-co-operation with evil means co-operation with all that is good.
Mahatma Gandhi
#38. Nobody was born nonviolent. No one was born charitable. None of us comes to these things by nature but only by conversion. The first duty of the nonviolent community is helping its members work upon themselves and come to conversion.
Lanza Del Vasto
#39. Nonviolent struggle is the most powerful means available to those struggling for freedom.
Gene Sharp
#40. Nonviolent ideals were cheap to hold if you were a scientist, living inside the Protego bubble cast by the police officers and soldiers whose actions you had the luxury to question.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#41. It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence,
Diane Nash
#43. That is someone who follows the teachings of the nonviolent Jesus and takes the gospel personally, and then pays the price. I fall into that category.
Martin Sheen
#44. I don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do.
Malcolm X
#45. Jesus faithfully and courageously represented the nonviolent and loving heart of God. Jesus and his way of nonviolent, self-giving love, the text suggests, will earn the trust of all humanity. We will ultimately migrate, in other words, toward the way of Jesus.
Brian D. McLaren
#46. I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier. In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you ... because no one has the right to take the life of another human being.
Joan Baez
#47. Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.
Gary L. Francione
#48. The movement of nonviolent non-co-operation has nothing in common with the historical struggles for freedom in the West.
Mahatma Gandhi
#49. For the nonviolent person, the whole world is one family. He will fear none, nor will others fear him.
Mahatma Gandhi
#50. 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,
Larry Klayman
#51. History's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component
Mark Kurlansky
#53. I highly recommend the approach Marshall Rosenberg details in Nonviolent Communication (2nd Edition 2008), which has essentially three parts: When X happens [described factually, not judgmentally], I feel Y [especially the deeper, softer emotions], because I need Z [fundamental needs and wants].
Rick Hanson
#54. A nonviolent action accompanied by nonviolence in thought and word should never produce enduring violent reaction upon the opponent.
Mahatma Gandhi
#55. If all were nonviolent, there would be no anarchy and there would be no question of anybody being armed for meeting aggression from without.
Mahatma Gandhi
#56. An awakened people who rely upon their nonviolent strength are independent in the face of any conceivable combination of the armed powers.
Mahatma Gandhi
#57. Teachers, parents and school administrators: Today's teachers can create a Planet of Peace. The communication process you will learn by reading Nonviolent Communication is the cornerstone.
Robert Muller
#58. The essence of nonviolence is love. Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies, tactics, and techniques for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally. Nonviolence is not a dogma; it is a process.
Nhat Hanh
#59. Throughout the 64-day campaign, events and activities for peace and nonviolence take place all around the world, highlighting existing peacebuilding initiatives and inspiring new year-round activities for a more peaceful, nonviolent, just and sustainable world.
Robert Alan Aurthur
#60. Jesus called for nonviolent resistance to Rome and just distribution of land and food. He was crucified because he threatened Roman stability - not as a sacrifice to God for humanity's sins
John Dominic Crossan
#61. I am convinced that even violent temperaments can be channeled through nonviolent discipline, if they can act constructively and express through an effective channel their very legitimate anger.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#62. Nonviolent non-co-operation is the only alternative to anarchy and worse.
Mahatma Gandhi
#63. I've been arrested three times. I don't like getting arrested, but it's not so bad when it's an organized form of nonviolent disobedience. It's something appealing to a higher law.
Josh Fox
#64. Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
Barbara Deming
#65. Jesus is the politics of the new age; He is about the establishment of a kingdom; He is the one who has created a new time that gives us the time not only to care for the poor but to be poor. Jesus is the one who makes it possible to be nonviolent in a violent world.
Stanley Hauerwas
#66. If we remain nonviolent, hatred will die as everything does from disuse.
Mahatma Gandhi
#67. True education should teach us how to think, how to see the beauty in the midst of ugliness, how to love without judging, how to find opportunity to help, and how to develop a peaceful and nonviolent society.
Debasish Mridha
#68. Himsa does not need to be taught, Man as animal is violent, but as spirit is nonviolent.
Mahatma Gandhi
#69. These are nonviolent people who have lost their freedom simply because they expressed their ideas ... In truth, they are heroes of our time.
Ai Weiwei
#70. This is who I am. Not everybody has to like it.
Lisa Kudrow
#71. Be the change you wish to see in the world," said Gandhi. If you want a nonviolent world, you cannot use violence to achieve it. He also said, "In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.
Russell Brand
#72. In Nonviolent Communication you will find an amazingly effective language for saying what's on your mind and in your heart. Like so many essential and elegant systems, it's simple on the surface, challenging to use in the heat of the moment and powerful in its results.
Vicki Robin
#73. A dog can bite you but you must not bite the dog! Your every movement in life must be peaceful; otherwise you lose your ethical superiority! Nonviolent civil disobedience is a genius; no power can beat it; use it when necessary!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#74. I still believe in the nonviolent Jesus and the basic human goodness present in all of us.
Martin Sheen
#75. Disobedience to be civil has to be open and nonviolent.
Mahatma Gandhi
#76. Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#77. It is the acid test of nonviolence that in a nonviolent conflict there is no rancor left behind, and in the end the enemies are converted into friends.
Mahatma Gandhi
#78. Nonviolent action means mobilization of world opinion in our favour.
Mahatma Gandhi
#79. The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.
Bayard Rustin
#81. Power doesn't back up in the face of a smile, or in the face of a threat of some kind of nonviolent loving action. It's not the nature of power to back up in the face of anything but some more power.
Malcolm X
#82. If we don't pay attention to [nonviolent protests], they are invisible, and it's as if they never happened. But I have seen first hand that if we do, they will multiply.
Julia Bacha
#83. Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest.
Eddie Vedder
#84. 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.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#85. In elementary school, we should teach nonviolent conflict resolution and healthy communication skills, which will help children cope with issues like rejection and sexuality later in life.
Jane Velez-Mitchell
#86. Two things distinguish nonviolent actions from violent actions. First, you don't see an enemy and second, your intention is not to make the other side suffer.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#87. I think we brought to the world, the United States anyway, the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. I think we showed the world that nonviolence can work to make social change.
Dolores Huerta
#88. To have peace in the world, men & nations must embrace the nonviolent assertion that ends and means must cohere.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#90. Any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent.
Myles Horton
#91. We are never angry because of what others say or do. It is our thinking that makes us angry.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#92. In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#93. So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn't because of Black Power, isn't because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it's not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities.
Stokely Carmichael
#94. Be nonviolent only with those who are nonviolent to you. And when you can bring me a nonviolent racist, bring me a nonviolent segregationist, then I'll get nonviolent. But don't teach me to be nonviolent until you teach some of those crackers to be nonviolent.
Malcolm X
#95. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#96. We have an historic opportunity for a great global healing and renewal. If we will accept the challenge of nonviolent activism with faith, courage, and determination, we can bring this great vision of a world united in peace and harmony from a distant ideal into glowing reality.
Coretta Scott King
#97. A true and nonviolent combination of labour would act like a magnet attracting to it all the needed capital.
Mahatma Gandhi
#98. Marshall Rosenberg provides us with the most effective tools to foster health and relationships. Nonviolent Communication connects soul to soul, creating a lot of healing. It is the missing element in what we do.
Deepak Chopra
#99. You cannot live a nonviolent life as long as you are consuming violence. Please consider going vegan.
Gary L. Francione
#100. Economic equality is the master-key to nonviolent independence.
Mahatma Gandhi
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