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Nonviolence Quotes

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Nonviolence Quotes

“Now on, the revolution and all the future revolutions must continue without resorting to violence. I am not talking about simply nonviolence, I am talking about having an actual and utter repulsiveness towards violence. This is the fundamental requirement of a civilized revolution.”

RevolutionSocial JusticeBrainy QuotesActivistNonviolenceBlack Lives MatterReformerPeaceful ProtestNonviolent
Book:Heart Force One: Need No Gun to Defend Society
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“The true father of free India was Subhas Chandra Bose, not Gandhi. Imagine Commander Washington asking his troops to never fire back a single musket ball no matter how many british guns are fired at them. And that's exactly what Gandhi asked of his people. Bose eventually raised the Indian National Army to fight against the British in India. Subhas Chandra Bose is to India what George Washington is to the United States of America. Unfortunately, Bose lost his life in a plane crash in 1945, but had he lived, he would've been the rightful prime minister of India, not Jawaharlal Nehru, who was more of a scholar, than a leader. However, the death of Bose and the struggles of the Indian National Army lighted the fire of revolution in the heart of the entire nation empowering them to revolt against the mighty British Empire, which compelled the British to leave all imperialist authority over India in the year 1947.”

IndiaNonviolenceAmerican HistoryImperialismGandhiBritish EmpireBritish HistoryBritish ImperialismIndian Independence MovementIndian History
Book:Hurricane Humans: Give me accountability, I'll give you peace
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“Centurion Sermon (Sonnet 1005) Peace is an act of ceasefire, Peace is an act of disarmament. If you don't get this simple fact, You need lessons on common sense. Beer is no bravery, Guns ain't no gallantry, Dump your bazookas in museum, Smell the roses with some coffee. Dump your scripture, pick up a sport, You'll learn a lot about honor and camaraderie. Dump your constitution, pick up gardening, You'll learn plenty about preserving life 'n liberty. Nationalism is the greatest threat to peace. Fundamentalism is the greatest threat to harmony.”

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Book:The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo
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“Together with a number of Negro and white reporters, I attended [Martin Luther] King's packed church. He spoke simply, emphasizing the nonviolent nature of the struggle, and told his congregation: "We are concerned not merely to win justice in the buses but rather to behave in a new and different way--to be nonviolent so that we may remove injustice itself, both from society and from ourselves. This is a struggle which we cannot lose, no matter what the apparent outcome, if we ourselves succeed in becoming better and more loving people.”

LoveStruggleSelf ImprovementResistanceCivil RightsNonviolenceMartin Luther King JrMlkMontgomery Bus Boycott
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“If Only (Sonnet 1983) If I were a fascist, I'd press that button, and wipe the colonizers off the planet for good. If I were a fascist, I'd press that button, and let millions of innocents burn for a greater global good. If I were a fascist, I'd press that button, sanctified of filth we would start anew. If only I were a fascist like you - if only!”

Human RightsHumanitarianFascismNonviolenceColonialismWorld PeacePeace ActivistNeonaziFascistCrime Against Humanity
Book:Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood
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“Way of The Slipper (Bug-Repellent Sonnet) This prehistoric world has an instinctual affinity to black and white, binary concepts. Justice is too grand an exercise to be contained by the binary nonsense of violence and nonviolence. Bullets are an act of violence, silence is an act of bookish nonviolence – but there is a third option – the way of the slipper. Slippers are more effective in fighting bugs, than bullets - slippers strip the bugs of power, while bullets make them martyr. With all your slippers combined, the mightiest of tyrant is bound to fall, be it a state head, court judge or copper, or oligarchs rendering democracy into jungle. When people blow their top, billionaires become bum, and presidents turn tramp. Fetch the household bug-repellent from under your feet, and treat the corrupt and bigoted like your offspring gone bad.”

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Book:Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience
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“The alternative to violence is nonviolent resistance. This method was made famous in our generation by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who used it to free India from the domination of the British empire. Five points can be made concerning nonviolence as a method in bringing about better racial conditions. First, this is not a method for cowards; it does resist. The nonviolent resister is just as strongly opposed to the evil against which he protests as the person who uses violence. His method is passive or nonaggressive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent. But his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is mistaken. This method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually; it is nonaggressive physically but dynamically aggressive spiritually. A second point is that nonviolent resistance does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness. A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not just the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. As I like to say to the people in Montgomery, Alabama: ‘The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory it will be a victory not merely for fifty thousand Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces of light. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may happen to be unjust.’ A fourth point that must be brought out concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. In struggling for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.”

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Author:Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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“When, for decades, you have been able to make a man compromise his manhood by threatening him with a cruel and unjust punishment, and when suddenly he turns upon you and says: "Punish me. I do not deserve it. But because I do not deserve it, I will accept it so that the world will know that I am right and you are wrong," you hardly know what to do. You feel defeated and secretly ashamed. You know that this man is as good a man as you are; that from some mysterious source he has found the courage and the conviction to meet physical force with soul force.”

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Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“Nonviolence is the foundation of civilization, but first we must ask, what is nonviolence? No matter what my good friend Jesus said two thousand years ago, nonviolence doesn't mean nonresistance to evil, nonviolence means restraining evil without retaliating with further evil.”

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Book:Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live
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“From the beginning a basic philosophy guided the movement. This guiding principle has since been referred to variously as nonviolent resistance, noncoöperation, and passive resistance. But in the first days of the protest none of these expressions was mentioned; the phrase most often heard was "Christian love." It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love. As the days unfolded, however, the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi began to exert its influence. I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom.”

Civil RightsNonviolenceAfrican AmericansBlacksGandhiChristian LoveNonviolent ResistancePassive ResistanceNoncooperation
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“That Monday I went home with a heavy heart. I was weighted down by a terrible sense of guilt, remembering that on two or three occasions I had allowed myself to become angry and indignant. I had spoken hastily and resentfully. Yet I knew that this was no way to solve a problem. 'You must not harbor anger,' I admonished myself. 'You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent, and yet not return anger. You must not become bitter. No matter how emotional your opponents are, you must be calm.”

AngerGuiltCivil RightsNonviolenceCalmnessIndignationNonviolent ResistanceResentfulness
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“When the law regulates behavior it plays an indirect part in molding public sentiment. The enforcement of the law is itself a form of peaceful persuasion. But the law needs help. The courts can order desegregation of the public schools. But what can be done to mitigate the fears, to disperse the hatred, violence, and irrationality gathered around school integration, to take the initiative out of the hands of racial demagogues, to release respect for the law? In the end, for laws to be obeyed, men must believe they are right. Here nonviolence comes in as the ultimate form of persuasion. It is the method which seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the conscience of the great decent majority who through blindness, fear, pride, or irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep.”

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Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“Why isn't it justified to resort to violence in the course of justice? It's because if you resort to violence for your conviction of humanity, then nothing stops the inhumans to resort to violence for their conviction. Hence nothing changes. We must change the very notion that it is okay to resort to violence if we want to change the society. What's need is a desire for reform founded entirely on the premise of peace.”

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Book:Solo Standing on Guard: Life Before Law
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“To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. This is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception. We do not have to adopt the hypothesis of Christ’s divinity because it has always been accepted by orthodox Christians. Instead, this hypothesis is orthodox because in the first years of Christianity there existed a rigorous (though not yet explicit) intuition of the logic determining the gospel text. A non-violent deity can only signal his existence to mankind by having himself driven out by violence – by demonstrating that he is not able to establish himself in the Kingdom of Violence. But this very demonstration is bound to remain ambiguous for a long time, and it is not capable of achieving a decisive result, since it looks like total impotence to those who live under the regime of violence. That is why at first it can only have some effect under a guise, deceptive through the admixture of some sacrificial elements, through the surreptitious re-insertion of some violence into the conception of the divine.”

NonviolenceChristologyDivinity Of JesusDemythologizing
Book:Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
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“Homing Pigeon (Sonnet 2311) I'm a homing pigeon, and I'm homing in on integration - and since there is no such thing, I'm building my homeworld person by person. I'll never force you to be inclusive, if you do harm, I'll restrain you, but I'll never resort to weapons - moreover, I'll never kill for inclusion, I'll simply beg, on my knees, I'll beg till I drop dead - because I have nothing to lose, no reputation, no image, no class - either love outlasts hate or extinction outruns evolution.”

PrejudiceSocial JusticeHuman RightsToleranceNonviolenceIntegrationMulticulturalismHate CrimeInclusivePoet Activist
Book:Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat
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“Assassinating a tyrant is not the solution, it only makes them a martyr to their followers. Stand up to them, strip them of their position, then throw 'em in jail. There's nothing more torturous to a megalomaniacal tyrant than rotting behind bars like a two-bit criminal.”

Social JusticeTyrannyOppressionNonviolenceOligarchyHumanitarian CrisisTyrantWar CriminalsCrime Against HumanityOppression And Government
Book:Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather
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“Azad Earth Army (The Sonnet) From river to the sea, Al Shams to Alpha Centauri, I'll radicalize each child into a volcanic veteran of inclusivity. Palestine, Kashmir, America, every territory will be humanized, without resorting to canon calls, for my soldiers are walking dynamite! Give me a speck of spinal nerve, I'll weave awaken bulldozing thunder! My patriots are keeper of the world, not stately pawn of terror and blunder. Awake, arise, adopt the world, let no monkey nationalize your humanity. Final call to a free* world, you, o bravehearts, are my *Azad Earth Army!”

Social JusticeHumanitarianCivil RightsService Of HumanityNonviolenceColonialismMulticulturalismHumanitarianismPeace ActivistNaskarians
Book:Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim
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“In a democracy, when the traffic light is red for freedoms, don’t ever stop, don’t ever wait! Refuse the red light, ignore it, break the rules and move forward! It is always legitimate to challenge fascism for every nation in the world as long as this challenge is nonviolent! Because violence means using the same vulgar, the same evil methods of fascism! Don’t behave like a dog when fighting against a dog!”

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Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“I Hate Guns (The Sonnet) Please don't hold a gun to my head, Because firearms terrify me to death. When I am scared stiff due to stupidity, Nothing can keep the beast from outbreak. I battle everyday to keep it tamed, I dread the moment the beast finds release. Mock me, hit me, I assure your safe return, Hold a gun, and be torn apart limb from limb! So, I implore you, o savage most refined, Please show some mercy, and give up your guns! Or be a stupid moron, and carry in secret, Just not stupid enough to draw at my loved ones. Committing primitivity even God won't escape the Ravager. Bullets work on two-bit terrorists, not natural disaster.”

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Book:Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence
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“You keep buying your children toy pistols, then you wonder, why there is no peace in the world! When you raise terrorists, you are bound to have terrorism - most of which is democratically glorified as patriotism. It takes just one generation of parents to put an end to the prehistoric tradition of war and hate - just one generation. So, my question is - are you that generation? Only parents can end wars, not politicians - only education can end terror, not armament.”

ParentingTerrorismHumanitarianPatriotismNonviolenceWorld PeacePeace ActivistWar And PeaceGood ParentingRaising Good Citizens
Book:Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch
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“You keep buying your children toy pistols, then you wonder, why there is no peace in the world! When you raise terrorists, you are bound to have terrorism - most of which is democratically glorified as patriotism.”

ParentingTerrorismPatriotismNonviolenceWorld PeacePeace ActivistWar And PeaceGun ViolenceGood ParentingRaising Good Citizens
Book:Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch
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