The First Things to Be Disrupted - Quotations on Nonviolence

The first things to be disrupted by our commitment to nonviolence will be not the system but our own lives.

Jim Douglass

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.

Dorothy Day

If we are to reach real pace in the world, we shall have to begin with children. And if they will grow up in their natural innocence, we won’t have to struggle, we won’t have to pass fruitless resolutions, but we shall go from love to love and peace to peace.

World peace starts right here. I will not raise my child to kill your child.

Barbara Choo

But there are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted. I never intended to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Far more violence to human beings in history has been done in obeying the law than in breaking the law.

Howard Zinn

I was 8 years old when my father was murdered. It is almost impossible to describe the pain of losing a parent to a senseless murder. And in the aftermath, it is similarly impossible to quiet the confusion: “Why him? Why this? Why me?” But even as a child one thing was clear to me: I didn’t want the killer, in turn, to be killed. I remember lying in bed and praying, “Please, God. Please don’t take his life, too.” I saw nothing that could be accomplished in the loss of one life being answered with the loss of another. And I knew, far too vividly, the anguish that would spread through another family—another set of parents, children, brothers and sisters thrown into grief.

M. Kerry Kennedy

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men.

Alice Walker

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

Ursula LeGuin

Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.

Francis of Assisi

Unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence.

But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder, the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s inhabitants, robbing them to feed the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this, it is the highest class, respected by everyone. And he who kills the most people receives the highest awards.

Chapter XXV, War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

Until now, study and research on nonviolence have enjoyed little institutional support from government, the university, or the church in the United States. Teaching nonviolence has been left to a handful of groups with limited personnel and financial support, such as the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Catholic Worker Movement. As of 1995, only one U.S. college--Colorado College--offers even a minor in nonviolence.

Michael True

Nonviolence offers no guarantees. But the curious thing is that people who do violence don’t receive guarantees either. Statistics show that you have a better chance of coming out alive in a nonviolent battle.

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary soldier. Therefore one who has love, courage and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha and Gandhi.

Ammon Hennacy

Few of us will ever do great things, but all of us can do small things in a great way.