Non Violence Quotes

Another site of Leftist struggle [other than Detroit] that has parallels to New Orleans: Palestine. From the central role of displacement to the ways in which culture and community serve as tools of resistance, there are illuminating comparisons to be made between these two otherwise very different places.In the New Orleans Black community, death is commemorated as a public ritual (it's often an occasion for a street party), and the deceased are often also memorialized on t-shirts featuring their photos embellished with designs that celebrate their lives. Worn by most of the deceased's friends and family, these t-shirts remind me of the martyr posters in Palestine, which also feature a photo and design to memorialize the person who has passed on. In Palestine, the poster's subjects are anyone who has been killed by the occupation, whether a sick child who died at a checkpoint or an armed fighter killed in combat. In New Orleans, anyone with family and friends can be memorialized on a t-shift. But a sad truth of life in poor communities is that too many of those celebrate on t-shirts lost their lives to violence. For both New Orleans and Palestine, outsiders often think that people have become so accustomed to death by violence that it has become trivialized by t-shirts and posters.While it's true that these traditions wouldn't manifest in these particular ways if either population had more opportunities for long lives and death from natural causes, it's also far from trivial to find ways to celebrate a life. Outsiders tend to demonize those killed--especially the young men--in both cultures as thugs, killers, or terrorists whose lives shouldn't be memorialized in this way, or at all. But the people carrying on these traditions emphasize that every person is a son or daughter of someone, and every death should be mourned, every life celebrated.

Jordan Flaherty

...if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting." (MLK)"...If given a choice between violent resistance and passive acceptance, King and Gandhi both accepted violence..." "...like violence, it [non-violent resistance] was aggressive, but it was spiritually, bot physically, so." "...At the same time the mind and the emotions are active, actively trying to persuade the opponent to change his ways and convince him that he is mistaken and to lift him to a higher level of existence.

S. Nassir Ghaemi

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

Peace is a deeper reality than violence."p. 231

Stanley Hauerwas

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

There is no such thing as a "just" war. It's just war. And it's antithetical to the Gospel.

David D. Flowers

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

Islam teaches tolerance, not hatred; universal brotherhood, not enmity; peace, and not violence.

Parwez Musharraf

The path of nonviolence is the path of respect. It is respect towards every being. It is the path of awakening the consciousness of every being.

Amit Ray

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

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

Nonviolence aims at doing no harm to living being. Compassion aims at doing good to all being.

Amit Ray

Compassion stands on the pillars of trust, love, awareness and detachment.

Amit Ray

Compassion means removal of suffering – suffering of the self and the others.

Amit Ray

Unnecessary bureaucracy hinders creativity, growth, justice and the attainment of peace.

We are killing, every one of us, every moment of the day - just by living. And if one realizes this, is this very realization itself not a conscious consent to murder? If a truly circumspect Jain was truly serious about not killing anything, wouldn't his only recourse be to kill himself?

Mark X.

I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.

Nonviolence is kindling light of love into the dark places and budding trust from the threshold of hopelessness.

Amit Ray

Nonviolence is a way of life, where the task is to awaken the underlying goodness of every human being.

Amit Ray

The world we have created, has problems, that can not be resolved by rich getting richer but by sharing we can over come the problems" Dr. Ron Harris - 2008

most Americans think of Rosa Parks as a demur, pleasant-enough seamstress who backed into history by being too tired to get out of her seat on a bus one day, in reality she had been trained in nonviolence spirit and tactics at a famous institution, Highlander Folk School. It seems to be a difficult concept for most of us that peace is a skill that can be learned. We know war can be learned, but we seem to think that one becomes a peacemaker by a mere change of heart. (23)

Live simply so others may simply live

We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion.

Let everyone evolve fast and understand humanity. Let the heart of stones be converted into heart of love.

Amit Ray

Non-violence is more powerful than violence. Nature eliminates violent animals bit by bit.

Amit Ray

We can make this a more peaceful century if we cherish non-violence and concern for others’ well-being.

Auliq-Ice

The world we have created has problems, that can be resolved by rich getting richer, bu by sharing we can. Ron Harris - 2008

Those who have chosen to provide for the health and well being of others. Call them homoeopaths, allopaths and whatever one may, they must remember, they have been called and have chosen to serve. Dr. Ron Harris - 1965

The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.

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.

The era of revolution by military means produced a greater degree of desperation and frustration. This was brought to an end by the people.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Violence only attacks the body, but it is non-violence that has the power to influence the soul and reshape it towards a peaceful future.

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.

As per the law of karma, that which is your meat today, this dear beloved animal will make mincemeat of you tomorrow. In another birth.

Fakeer Ishavardas

Your blessings are very important to melt down the stony hearts.

Amit Ray

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

Compassion is the signature of Higher Consciousness. Non-violence is the tool to evolve into the Higher Consciousness.

Amit Ray

I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more.