Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

Nonviolence is an imperative in order to bring about ultimate community.

The force generated by nonviolence is infinitely greater than the force of all the arms created by man's ingenuity.

The power of nonviolent resistance can only come from honest working of the constructive programme.

Whatever strength the masses have is due entirely to ahimsa, however imperfect or defective its practice might have been.

In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

For mass struggles, nonviolence is essential.

For a nonviolent struggle, there is no age limit. The blind, the maimed and the bed-ridden may serve, and not only men but women also.

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.

The Congress fights not with violent but with nonviolent means, however imperfect, however crude the nonviolence may be.

Nonviolent action, born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love, is the most effective way to confront adversity.

The essence of nonviolence is love. Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies, tactics, and techniques for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally. Nonviolence is not a dogma; it is a process.

Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.

Nonviolence is a universal principle and its operation is not limited by a hostile environment.

The point on nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink.

A little of true nonviolence acts in a silent, subtle, unseen way and leavens the whole society.

The power of unarmed nonviolence is any day far superior to that of armed force.

Civil disobedience is the only nonviolent escape from the soul-destroying heat of violence.

I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.

I think we brought to the world, the United States anyway, the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. I think we showed the world that nonviolence can work to make social change.

I don't accept armed struggle. Maybe it was the way in the '50s and '60s, but we want a democratic revolution.

Nonviolence or soul force does not need physical aids for its propagation of effect.

Sometimes when we're incensed by the rancid tide of injustice, the impulse is to attack. We must avoid this. We have learned that violence as a means is always unsuccessful.

Nonviolence to be worth anything has to work in the face of hostile forces.

Somebody must have sense enough to meet hate with love. Somebody must have sense enough to meet physical force with soul force. If we will but try this way, we will be able to change these conditions and yet at the same time win the hearts and souls of those who have kept these conditions alive a way as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth, as modern as the techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi. There is another way.