Top 60 Nonviolent Quotes

You have troubles with violent indigenous movement around the continent. Here, we are putting more power in their hands and creating a nonviolent indigenous society.

Occupy has to continue as a bold, in-your-face movement – occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, campuses and Wall Street itself. We need weekly – if not daily – nonviolent assaults right on Wall Street.

I wish I could say to all those people who consider themselves anarchists or radicals: Please join the nonviolent movement. This is how Gandhi freed India. If Gandhi freed India, we can certainly free the United States from our racism, misogyny, and bigotry.

I wish I could say to all those people who consider themselves anarchists or radicals: Please join the nonviolent movement. This is how Gandhi freed India. If Gandhi freed India, we can certainly free the United States from our racism, misogyny, and bigotry.

We need to look at the totality of the things that we’re labeling as violent and really examine whether we need to have some more proportionality in terms of the punishment fitting the crime that’s done. The bright line that we have right now, between violent and nonviolent, does not account for shades of gray.

Politics is not perfect but it’s the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live.

Christians are nonviolent not, therefore, because we believe that nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but because nonviolence is constitutive of what it means to be a disciple to Jesus.

I myself am a very nonviolent person and only resort to violence when I absolutely have to.

You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.

Research confirms that both Republican and Democratic women are more likely than their male counterparts to initiate and fight for bills that champion social justice, protect the environment, advocate for families, and promote nonviolent conflict resolution.

Oh, Diane Nash deserves her own film. Diane Nash is a freedom fighter who is still alive and kicking. She was one of the leaders of the desegregation of Nashville, basically. She was a student at Fisk University who was one of the founding members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

I still believe in the nonviolent Jesus and the basic human goodness present in all of us.

Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common: They are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause.

The broad consensus is that our system should be better structured to deter crimes without giving up on everyone who commits them, and should better balance resources to hold violent criminals fully accountable without imposing unnecessarily harsh sentences on nonviolent offenders.

One can imagine nonviolent or minimally violent ways to reduce or eliminate hatred, but there’s no mollifying evil.

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.

It’s never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to ‘control protestors’ – especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent.

I myself am a very nonviolent person and only resort to violence when I absolutely have to.

The U.S. is supposed to be a nation of second chances, but for the 70 million Americans with a criminal record, we’re not doing such a great job. Even among those whose crimes were nonviolent and committed long ago, too many still bear a scarlet letter.

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.

We may never be strong enough to be entirely nonviolent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep nonviolence as our goal and make strong progress towards it.

My position has always been, along with many other people, that any differences be resolved in a nonviolent way.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

Back in 2014, my fellow Hong Kongers and I hoped to use nonviolent means to fight for our territory‘s democratic system – a simple right, promised by Beijing, to choose our own leader.

My position has always been, along with many other people, that any differences be resolved in a nonviolent way.

I rejected the armed struggle because, as a Christian, I am committed to a nonviolent and peaceful struggle. But people take their own initiatives, because it is a Lebanon type of situation here.

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

On some campuses, change is effected through nonviolent or even violent means.

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.

The voice of women has a special role and a special soul force in the struggle for a nonviolent world.

We need to rethink a system that has targeted young people, particularly young people of color, for nonviolent crimes.

My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers.

If I fail to remove Marcos and vindicate the people’s verdict by peaceful, nonviolent action, my methods will be discredited. And if anger persists, I will be marginalized, and others will take over leadership of the movement.

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.

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.

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision… is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.

One of the things I loved – or I love still – about this Occupy movement is it’s got a very gentle core. I mean, it’s really decidedly nonviolent in the face of all kinds of situations.

Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.

My own hope is that, as a human species, we are on a long journey of evolution toward increasingly more tolerant and nonviolent behavior.

I welcome nonviolent protests as an exercise of our great democracy.

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.

Camus believed in dialogue and diplomacy, and enlisted his work as a philosopher to the need to find nonviolent solutions, whereas Sartre called for violent conflicts and justified terror.

Demonstrations must be dignified and nonviolent, as the overwhelming protests in Ferguson and Staten Island have been. Do not confuse anarchists who don’t want the system to work and thugs who want to exploit a situation with the majority who from day one have operated with impeccable nonviolence and clear goals.

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.

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.

We can prevent fighting by limiting weapons or finding nonviolent ways to end disputes.

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

Politics is not perfect but it’s the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live.

Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

Camus believed in dialogue and diplomacy, and enlisted his work as a philosopher to the need to find nonviolent solutions, whereas Sartre called for violent conflicts and justified terror.

We are fighting to pass clean-slate legislation in Pennsylvania to seal nonviolent misdemeanor records automatically after 10 years. We must provide opportunities for employment, housing, education, loans, and voting. We should not disenfranchise a third of the population.

It’s hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent. Everything in the universe does something when you start playing with his life, except the American Negro. He lays down and says, ‘Beat me, daddy.’

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.

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.

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.

If people are being upstanding citizens of the Republic, then you have to widen the net to incarcerate them. This explains why America’s prisons are full of nonviolent offenders – a perfect example of American exceptionalism.

I rejected the armed struggle because, as a Christian, I am committed to a nonviolent and peaceful struggle. But people take their own initiatives, because it is a Lebanon type of situation here.

Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.

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.