Nonviolent Action Quotes & Sayings

Nonviolent action, born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love, is the most effective way to confront adversity. — Thich Nhat Hanh

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.

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.

I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. — Martin Luther King Jr.

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I think the big turning moment was when I joined the student political action club and started studying nonviolent civil disobedience in response to the Iraq War. The first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta was the first protest that I'd ever been to, and I helped organize the school walkout when I was a junior. It was a really solidifying moment. — Cecily McMillan

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

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

Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us. — Barbara Deming

The first essential characteristics of nonviolent action is that it is creative. — Hildegard Goss-Mayr

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface hidden tension that is already alive — Martin Luther King Jr.

Nonviolent action involves opposing the opponent's power, including his police & military capacity, not with the weapons chosen by him but by quite different means ... Repression by the opponent is used against his own power position in a kind of political " ju-jitsu " and the very sources of his power thus reduced or removed, with the result that his political and military position is seriously weakened or destroyed. — Gene Sharp

Why did this keep happening? Why her? Perhaps there was some pheromone certain people omitted, perceivable only on a wavelength unique to those individuals who preyed on them. — Nenia Campbell

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face. — Chris Hedges

A nonviolent action accompanied by nonviolence in thought and word should never produce enduring violent reaction upon the opponent. — Mahatma Gandhi

Nonviolent action without the co-operation of the heart and the head cannot produce the intended result. — Mahatma Gandhi

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain? — Adrienne Rich

Judicial judgment must take deep account of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today. — Felix Frankfurter

It there any nation that acknowledges its errors and its sins and its crimes and the things it has done that are not consistent with its principles more than the United States? No, there is not. — Bill Bennett

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

The ability to share the Gospel isn't a 'gift' that has been given to only a few Latter-day Saints and denied to the rest. — Clayton Christensen

Nonviolent action on behalf of justice is no automatic forumla with promise of success: but neither is war. After all, at least half of the people who go to war for some cause deemed worthy of it are defeated. — John Howard Yoder

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The thing about nonviolence is that it spreads. When you get people to participate in nonviolent action - whether it's a fast, a march, a boycott, or a picket line - people hear you, people see you, people are learning from that action. — Dolores Huerta

Nonviolent action means mobilization of world opinion in our favour. — Mahatma Gandhi