Quotes About Civil Disobedience

#1. Mass civil disobedience is like an earthquake, a sort of general upheaval on the political plane.

Mahatma Gandhi

#2. The problem in this world is not civil disobedience ... th e problem in this world is civil obedience.

Howard Zinn

#3. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.

Howard Zinn

#4. It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

Tariq Ali

#5. Unless nonviolence of the strong is really developed among us, there should be no thought of civil disobedience for Swaraj, whether within the states or in British India.

Mahatma Gandhi

#6. Civil disobedience presupposes willing obedience of our self-imposed rules, and without it civil disobedience would be a cruel joke.

Mahatma Gandhi

#7. I am at a crossroads; I have always been against armed opposition ... I have chosen civil disobedience. But I will apologize to my people if there are funerals coming out of prisons. I will criticize myself and I won't be the mayor of Diyarbakir.

Osman Baydemir

#8. Civil disobedience is not only the natural right of a people, especially when they have no effective voice in their own Government, but that it is also a substitute for violence or armed rebellion.

Mahatma Gandhi

#9. Mass civil disobedience was for the attainment of independence.

Mahatma Gandhi

#10. Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing.

Ron Paul

#11. All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together.

Nancy Gibbs

#12. Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights.

Sonia Johnson

#13. Before civil disobedience can be practised on a vast scale, people must learn the art of civil or voluntary obedience.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. Individual civil disobedience was everybody's inherent right, like the right of self-defence in normal life.

Mahatma Gandhi

#15. If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.

Francis A. Schaeffer

#16. Complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful rebellion, a refusal to obey every single state-made law.

Mahatma Gandhi

#17. Civil disobedience is the only nonviolent escape from the soul-destroying heat of violence.

Mahatma Gandhi

#18. Active nonviolence is necessary for those who will offer civil disobedience but the will and proper training are enough for the people to co-operate with those who are chosen for civil disobedience.

Mahatma Gandhi

#19. Civil disobedience does not admit of any violence or countenancing of violence directly or indirectly.

Mahatma Gandhi

#20. My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI.

Martin Sheen

#21. Civil disobedience's main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

Noam Chomsky

#22. Civil disobedience is the inherent right of a citizen.

Mahatma Gandhi

#23. I believe that Gandhi was correct. Non-violent civil disobedience is the only way to bring about change that allows people to enjoy the change and not get killed in the process.

Edward James Olmos

#24. There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.

Douglas Brinkley

#25. Peaceful civil disobedience to unjust laws, which I support with every fiber of my being, can sometimes be necessary at any level of government. It falls upon the people, in the last resort, to stand against injustice no matter where it occurs.

Ron Paul

#26. Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#27. Civil disobedience can only lead to strength and purity.

Mahatma Gandhi

#28. Aggressive civil disobedience should be confined to a vindication of the right of free speech and free association.

Mahatma Gandhi

#29. King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.

Constance Baker Motley

#30. Satyagraha does not begin and end with civil disobedience.

Mahatma Gandhi

#31. Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play.

Al Gore

#32. Civil disobedience is not accepted by religion and the state does not accept it and there are many verses in the Holy Book that talk of following the ruler.

Pope Shenouda III

#33. In placing civil disobedience before constructive work I was wrong and I did not profit by the Himalayan blunder that I had committed.

Mahatma Gandhi

#34. Civil disobedience is - it's no fun.

Noam Chomsky

#35. To engage in civil disobedience is to feel the abundance of courage, the gratitude for a democracy that still invites us to speak from our hearts, to act from our conscience and have faith in the consequences of moral action. Abundance is a form of consciousness.

Terry Tempest Williams

#36. If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done.

Mahatma Gandhi

#37. Without proper, careful organisation of the spinning wheel and khaddar, there is absolutely no civil disobedience.

Mahatma Gandhi

#38. Don't worry. The chaps train for civil disobedience suppression. We'll crack a few heads, chuck some of the would-be revolutionaries in jail, and the rest will slink off back to their hovels and drink themselves stupid all night. And if worse comes to worst, well, we've got all the guns, haven't we?

Peter F. Hamilton

#39. In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state's failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.

Al Sharpton

#40. I never read Civil Disobedience. They did assign it.

Brian Spellman

#41. 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

#42. Civil disobedience can never be in general terms, such as for independence.

Mahatma Gandhi

#43. Civil disobedience is a stimulation for the fighters and a challenge to the opponent, in the present instance, authority.

Mahatma Gandhi

#44. Civil disobedience is a lever which can move the world by using peace as a fulcrum.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#45. I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

Terry Tempest Williams

#46. Accepting yourself as you are is an act of civil disobedience.

Francesca Martinez

#47. I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it.

Martin Sheen

#48. I don't advocate civil disobedience. I do advocate the role of an informed citizen to try to overturn when a court makes a mistake and gets an issue wrong.

Rick Santorum

#49. Civil disobedience has almost always been about expression. Generally, it's nonviolent, as defined by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.

Marvin Ammori

#50. Non-co-operation and civil disobedience are but different branches of the same tree called satyagraha.

Mahatma Gandhi

#51. It is alarming ... to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience.

Winston Churchill

#52. 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

#53. The Charkha, which is the embodiment of willing obedience and calm persistence, must therefore succeed before there is civil disobedience.

Mahatma Gandhi

#54. Civil disobedience is the assertion of a right which law should give but which it denies.

Mahatma Gandhi

#55. If youre a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.

Al Gore

#56. Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.

Howard Zinn

#57. Why was there not massive civil disobedience against this anti-Christian discrimination, as there was against segregation?

Pat Buchanan

#58. Civil disobedience means capacity for unlimited suffering, without the intoxicating excitement of killing.

Mahatma Gandhi

#59. The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance.

Terry Tempest Williams

#60. Satyagraha and civil disobedience and fasts have nothing in common with the use of force, veiled or open.

Mahatma Gandhi

#61. Yes, what has happened is we have moved from responding to these terrorist attacks as acts of civil disobedience to getting to the point after September 11 that we said, no, this is not just civil disobedience, this is an act of war.

Marsha Blackburn

#62. Civil disobedience is a preparation for mute suffering.

Mahatma Gandhi

#63. In every country where there is a vicious oppression, a peaceful and a continuous civil disobedience is the magical door opening to the freedom!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#64. Gandhi said that only people with a high regard for the law were qualified for civil disobedience.

Mark Shepard

#65. Civil disobedience is an act of love.

Tim DeChristopher

#66. True civil disobedience ... compels the state to resort to power.

Archibald Cox

#67. I find this proposed amendment very, very, very, very shocking. And immoral. And, you know, if civil disobedience is the way to go about change, then I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco.

Rosie O'Donnell

#68. I don't believe in eye-for-an-eye. The most incredible, sustainable, beautiful movements have been non-violent movements of civil disobedience.

Ellen Page

#69. 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

#70. Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness.

Mahatma Gandhi

#71. Civil disobedience and excitement and intoxication go ill together.

Mahatma Gandhi

#72. There is no "playing with truth" in the Charkha programme, for satyagraha is not predominantly civil disobedience but a quiet and irresistible pursuit of Truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

#73. The question deserves to be asked: Is hating one's nation really such a bad thing? Or perhaps more importantly, after the crimes our government has committed, what moral self-respecting person can truly love this nation?

Michel Templet

#74. Disobedience that is wholly civil should never provoke retaliation.

Mahatma Gandhi

#75. Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.

Henry David Thoreau

#76. The basis of Gandhi's nonviolence is to appeal to the good in others and evoke sympathy to one's cause through self-suffering.

Arun Gandhi

#77. We live in a nation where education and free thought are tantamount to treason, and I have to ask, under these circumstances, is treason such a bad thing?

Michel Templet

#78. Little attention was paid, because the German people, no matter how hungry, remained obedient.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#79. If you're not going to use your free speech to criticize your own government, then what the hell is the point of having it?

Michel Templet

#80. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

Henry David Thoreau

#81. [Theseus] soon found himself involved in factions and troubles; those who long had hated him had now added to their hatred contempt; and the minds of the people were so generally corrupted, that, instead of obeying commands with silence, they expected to be flattered into their duty.

Plutarch

#82. Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.

Howard Zinn

#83. Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.

Henry David Thoreau

#84. When EVIL men make bad laws, righteous men disobey them."
Pastor Butch Paugh

Tarrin P. Lupo

#85. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law

Martin Luther King Jr.

#86. One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#87. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#88. Disobedience to be civil has to be open and nonviolent.

Mahatma Gandhi

#89. If we don't rebel, if we're not physically in an active rebellion, then it's spiritual death.

Chris Hedges

#90. There is a heady sense of manhood that comes from advancing from apathy to commitment, from timidity to courage, from passivity to aggressiveness. There is an intoxication that comes from standing up to the police at last.

David T. Dellinger

#91. Disobedience to rigid laws is a revolutionary act.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#92. New concepts should be introduced by the power of imagery.

Douglas Coop

#93. Ethnicity and tribe began, by definition, where sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state.

James C. Scott

#94. It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

Aristotle.

#95. Disobedience, to be civil, implies discipline, thought, care, attention.

Mahatma Gandhi

#96. That we should obey laws whether good or bad is a new-fangled notion. There was no such thing in former days. The people disregarded those laws they did not like and suffered the penalties for their breach.

Mahatma Gandhi