Non Violence Quotes

“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. ”
― Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire

“Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“Compassion is the signature of Higher Consciousness. Non-violence is the tool to evolve into the Higher Consciousness.”
― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power

“We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion.”
― Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living

“I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more.”
― Chief Joseph

“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War 1942-49

“I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“Your blessings are very important to melt down the stony hearts.”
― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power

“When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Islam teaches tolerance, not hatred; universal brotherhood, not enmity; peace, and not violence.”
― Parwez Musharraf

“The first principal of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“Among all the methods, non-violence is most successful, and I strongly believe that only non-violence can set the true mood of peace and harmony among the nuclear nations. Our experiments with non-violence should be more wide, more engaging and more humble.”
― Amit Ray, Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth

“When I feel angry, I want to say something mean, or yell, or hit. But feeling like I want to is not the same as doing it. Feeling can't hurt anyone or get me into trouble, but doing can." (Bunny from picture book)”
― Cornelia Maude Spelman, When I Feel Angry

“COVID-19 is not just a medical challenge, but a spiritual challenge too. To defeat covid humanity need to follow the path of self-purification, compassion, nonviolence, God and the Nature.”
― Amit Ray, Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity

“The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate. p. 21”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“Unnecessary bureaucracy hinders creativity, growth, justice and the attainment of peace.”
― Widad Akrawi

“To achieve peace, it is crucial to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy that prevents peace processes from advancing.”
― Widad Akrawi

“Live simply so others may simply live”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Peace: The Words and Inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi

“Violence is the first impulse of the wounded and the uninspired, and we... Dracul... are neither.”
― Marjorie M. Liu, Monstress, Vol. 4: The Chosen

“Hindus should not harbour anger against Muslims even if the latter wants to destroy and kill us all. We should face death bravely. If Muslims established their rule after killing all Hindus we would be ushering in a new India.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If there is one thing in life that you should be very proud of about yourself, it should be this: I have never used violence against anyone in my life, I was given a gun in the war, I threw the gun on the ground; I neither clenched my fist nor drew a sword at anyone!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The renunciation of violence by faithful followers of Jesus thus serves a crucial apologetic purpose in establishing the truthfulness of Christian claims. If the church of Jesus Christ is living without war and violence, then the prophecy is fulfilled. Without this embodied peace in the Christian community, such apologetic claims are destroyed and Christian claims about Jesus’ messiahship lose their credibility.”
― Rob Arner, Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity

“Indeed, the whole of Christology is undermined if outsiders are unable to look at the life of the church and see in its nonviolence the fulfillment of Isaiah’s oracle, for if we are unable to point to a peaceable Christian church to substantiate our claims, how can we credibly say that Messiah has come, if wars and violence continue even in our own midst? Our claims about Jesus ring hollow and empty to skeptical ears if we do not embody the peace and nonviolence which Isaiah foretold that the Messiah would bring.”
― Rob Arner, Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity

“Le mantra de la non-violence est fatiguant. Chacun est contre la violence, ce n’est pas du tout la question. Elle serait plutôt : que fait-on face à deux violences qui s’opposent ? Ou encore : laisser faire la violence muette ne relève-t-il pas d’une violence insidieuse plus terrible encore ? Une violence plus cynique et plus dévastatrice puisqu’elle offre le confort moral et l’impunité légale, tout en perpétuant l’exploitation la plus brutale.”
― Aurélien Barrau, Il faut une révolution politique, poétique et philosophique: Entretien avec Carole Guilbaud

“A victory is a victory only if it is achieved peacefully, without any use of violence! If you have defeated your enemy not with ideas or with love, but with fists and weapons, the name of that victory is not victory, it is just becoming a scorpion against a scorpion, becoming a devil against the devil!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Non-violence wasn't a simply rejection of force. It was more a matter of opposing physical force with the force of the soul alone. Gandhi did not say: make no resistance when the blows rain down, when the brutality redoubles. He said almost the opposite: resist with your entire soul by standing up for as long as possible, never surrendering any of your dignity, and without showing the slightest aggression or doing anything at all that might restore, between the whipper and the whipped, any reciprocity or equivalence in a community of violence and hate. On the contrary, show immense compassion for the one who is beating you. The relation should remain asymmetric in every respect: on one side a blind, physical, hate-filled rage, on the other a spiritual force of love. If you hold firm, then the relationship is reversed; physical force degrades the one who uses it, who becomes a furious beast, while all human qualities are reflected in his prone victim, raised to a state of pure humanity by the attempt to lay him low. Non-violence puts violence to shame. To continue beating someone who opposes physical brutality with pure humanity, simply dignity, is to lose your honour and your soul there and then.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking