We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in the derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves.

- Marshall Rosenberg

When people are laughing, they're generally not killing each other.

- Alan Alda

Violence is an admission that one's ideas and goals cannot prevail on their own merits.

- Edward Kennedy

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.

- Julia Ward Howe

You must show the world that you abhor fighting.

- Bishop Desmond Tutu

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

- Theodor Adorno

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

- Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

For every Crusade and Revolution and Civil War, there have always been those who argued, with great clarity, that violence not only was immoral but that it was even a less effective means of achieving laudable goals.

- Mark Kurlansky

Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing.

- Mark Kurlansky

Violence is not power, but the absence of power.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

- Albert Camus



Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other dictators were exposed to severe physical mistreatment in childhood and refused to face up to the fact later. Instead of seeing and feeling what had happened to them, they avenged themselves vicariously by killing millions of people. And millions of others helped them to do so.

- Alice Miller



The claim that mild punishments (slaps or smacks) have no detrimental effect is still widespread because we got this message very early from our parents who had taken it over from their own parents. Unfortunately, the main damage it causes is precisely the broad dissemination of this conviction. The result of which is that each successive generation is subjected to the tragic effects of so called physical "correction."

- Alice Miller



Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti



In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

- Alice Miller



It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary, the evil it does is permanent.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

- Jimmy Carter



If we are going to stop wars on this earth, we are going to have to make war on hunger our number one priority.

- David W. Brooks



I am not predicting the dawn of global democracy or global socialism. What I am predicting is an era of turmoil and uncertainty. Moreover, like all forms of power, interdependent power has a dark side, and it has always had a dark side. The hungry and diseased mobs who terrified the burghers of late-medieval Europe were not enlightenment thinkers, nor are the suicide bombers thrust forward by a resurgent Islam. Even the struggles of the Western Federation of Miners had a dark side, as they fought state and company violence with their own violence. Still, the defiant movements from the bottom that are fueled by interdependent power hold at least the hope that the needs and dreams of the great masses of the planet's people will make their imprint on the new societies for which we wish. Of course, the process of reform will be complicated and the outcomes shaped not only by interdependent power, but also by the complex institutional structures we inherit, cultural memory, and the concentrated power resources of aggrandizing elites. All that said, without the tempering influence of movements from below and the interdependent power they wield, our future is ominous.

- Frances Fox Piven



I am willing to accept that there might be rare circumstances where applications of force might be effective,

- Howard Zinn



Historically, the most terrible things -- war, genocide, and slavery -- have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

- Howard Zinn



There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

- Howard Zinn



Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

- John F. Kennedy



We must also be careful to avoid ingesting toxins in the form of violent TV programs, video games, movies, magazines, and books. When we watch that kind of violence, we water our own negative seeds, or tendencies, and eventually we will think and act out of those seeds.

- Thich Nhat Hanh



Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

- John Ruskin



All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

- John Ruskin



Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

- Isaac Asimov



The Roots of Violence:
Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life.

- Jean Goss



Also quoted as: "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." or "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier. In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you...because no one has the right to take the life of another human being.

- Joan Baez



We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.

- Bishop Desmond Tutu



All who affirm the use of violence admit it is only a means to achieve justice and peace. But peace and justice are nonviolence...the final end of history. Those who abandon nonviolence have no sense of history. Rather they are bypassing history, freezing history, betraying history.

- Andre Trocme



The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

- A. J. Muste



We tend to think the problem is human beings have this natural tendency to kill, and yet in the middle of a hot war, WWII, a "good war," as it were, the US army was astonished to learn that at least three out of every four riflemen who were trained to kill and commanded to kill, could not bring themselves to pull the trigger when they could see the person they were ordered to kill. And that inner resistance to violence is a well kept secret.

- William Ury



Violence is the last word of the illiterate. Also the first.

- Solomon Short



All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.

- Marshall Rosenberg



Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.

- Colman McCarthy