Quotes About Resistance

Finally, Rønneberg, the leader of Gunnerside and the last surviving saboteur, who was ninety-six years old in 2016, often spoke eloquently about why he braved the North Sea to be trained in Britain and why he then returned, twice, by parachute, to Norway. "You have to fight for your freedom," he said. "And for peace. You have to fight for it every day, to keep it. It's like a glass boat; it's easy to break. It's easy to lose.

They were there for Norway, for the freedom of its lands and people from Nazi rule.

What you resist, persists

It is in no small part to Henry's resistance that the Constitution owes the Second Amendment in particular—the one that promises "the right to keep and bear arms" in order to have "a wellregulated militia"—and it too was, in part, about slavery, because in the South, the militia was understood to be identical with the slave patrols that were constantly on guard.

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan.

Todo nuestro pasado nos ha preparado para reconocer y resistir una prisión cuando las rejas empiezan a cerrarse detrás de nosotros. Nos alzamos en armas contra estos problemas. Pero ¿qué si no se sienten gritos de angustia? ¿Quién está preparado para luchar contra un mar de diversiones? ¿A quién y cuándo nos quejamos, y en qué tono de voz, cuando un discurso serio se disuelve en risas estúpidas?

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

We took them up to the register, where the student worker on duty had a large silver ring pierced through the side of her nose. I had an urge to get Rochester's leash and see if I could hook it to her ring, but I resisted.

Disaffection, once begun, acquires a momentum of its own

Because, all too often, the things that we're the most resistant to are precisely what we need. And the things we're most scared to let go of are exactly the ones we most need to relinquish.

Gandhi, convinced of the power of satyagraha, suggested that it be used by the Jews against the Nazis. In response, Martin Buber – who had earlier (1930) written that much could be learned from Gandhi – said that this method could not be used against the Nazis. It is one thing to use nonviolent methods against those who would deprive you of some material benefit, but if their basic aim is to deprive you of life itself, how can you resist nonviolently?

you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.

we have been civilizing the Filipinos up to the point where they are unanimous only on one thing, namely, that they want us to leave."12

But she did not look the future in the face. She wanted to feel nothing, to think nothing; simply to believe that it was all silly invention on her part. Yet she could not. Not quite.

I never consented to this body I've been charged with dragging until my death—

The devil lives in a double-shot", Roman explains himself obscurely. "I got a great worm inside. Gnaws and gnaws. Every day I drown him and every day he gnaws. Help me drown the worm, fellas.

There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile to continue talking about peace and non-violence against a government whose only reply is savage attacks on an unarmed and defenceless people.

When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

Violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid.

we fought injustice wherever we found it, no matter how large, or how small, and we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity.

But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.

Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do. But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.