User account | Beyond Intractability

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

- Leo Tolstoy

The first essential characteristics of nonviolent action is that it is creative.

- Hildegarde Goss-Mayr

I am part and parcel of the whole and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity.

- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak...Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.

- Cesar Chavez

The finger pulls the trigger, but the trigger may also be pulling the finger.

- Leonard Berkowitz

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.

- William Ralph Inge

The point of nonviolence is to build...a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink...a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

- Joan Baez

There are only two families in the world, as my grandmother used to say: the haves and the have-nots

- Sancho Panza

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Compromise does not mean cowardice.

- John F. Kennedy

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?

- Joan Baez

There is no conflict that cannot be resolved. Violent conflict is created and sustained by human beings, and it can be ended by human beings.

- George Mitchell

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

- Nelson Mandela

When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.

- Helder Camara