Quotes About Nonviolence

Evil can be opposed without being mirrored. Oppressors can be resisted without being emulated. Enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.

Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil.

The ultimate weakness of violence," observed Martin Luther King, Jr., "is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.

The command to love our enemies reminds us that our first task towards oppressors is pastoral: to help them recover their humanity. Quite possibly the struggle, and the oppression that gave it rise, have dehumanised the oppressed as well, causing them to demonise their enemies. It is not enough to become politically free; we must also become human. Nonviolence presents a change for all parties to rise above their present condition and become more of what God created them to be.

Nonviolence is an ideal propped up against the cultural reality of violence.

In other words, where Borg and Crossan stress the critique of large political structures with the values of justice and nonviolence, Jesus' teaching appears to address the local structures of relation-ships, neighbors, and manner of worship before God, while under-scoring love of one's neighbor and calling for just treatment of others.

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.

For [Martin Luther] King nonviolence was more than a strategy; it was the way of life defined by love for others—the only way to heal broken humanity.

Let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation's bloodstream.

I don't just want to ban The Bomb. I want to ban all bombs, whatever, and all bombers, whoever, and all bombings, whyever. There have to be better ways of saying no and making changes.

Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by patience.

I must warn you," he says. Whatever persecutions the Christians have experienced, and whether it has been Jews or pagans or heretics who have mistreated them, Christians must not avenge themselves. Cyprian places himself among them: "We should not hasten to revenge their pain with an angry speed.

Tertullian recounts the narrative of Jesus, whose labors (unlike Hercules's) did not include killing, capturing, and stealing43 but who instead kept a low profile, who bore reproaches, who would not hear of forcing people, who ate at anyone's table, who declined to call for massive angelic intervention, who rejected the avenging sword, who healed the servant of his enemy, and thereby "cursed for all time the works of the sword.

First of all, I was a good Christian kid. My mom and dad taught me never to fight. So I never fought. The other kids picked that up right away. They said, 'Oh, he's not going to try to do anything.' They'd push me, shove me, hit me. I'd just stand there and take it.

Nobody picked up guns in those days. You put on music, and it made you feel great.

Pirates worked to avoid violence and fighting.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

I want a world of peace. I'm not interested in bombs. I'm not interested in wars. I'm interested in peace.

Gandhi refused to accept that tanks and bombs constituted a nation's ultimate strength. To him, the health, education and unity of a nation's people were more important.

Gandhi was warning that in a nation which honoured killing, the weak would be bullied by the well-armed, the well-heeled and the strong-bodied.

Tilak had complained that Gandhi was asking too much of the Indian people. He was proved right. Non-violence, not harming the hated British, embracing jails, Hindu-Muslim unity, giving up titles, contributing money, the abolition of untouchability—each item on the long list was desirable, but also costly.

If the price of peace on India's streets was capitulation to the Empire and its threats, Gandhi was not willing to pay that price.

Ordered to open fire at unarmed protesters, Indian soldiers of the Empire's Garhwal Rifles, staged a satyagraha of their own and refused.

Gandhi was a great man but he failed to understand two things: the value of the sword, and the danger from Islam.