Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

We must accept the possibility of bloodshed if we are to bring about order.

War and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

The art of power often involves brutality — and other offenses too.

Coercion. The unpardonable crime.

Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

You use force, you create fear. Fear destroys trust. Trust is the basis of harmony. The hardliner believes harmony and unity can be brought by force. That's totally unscientific, totally wrong.

There are certain wicked people in the world that you can't deal with except by force.

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

The power that is supported by force alone will have cause often to tremble.

The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been.

A peace that depends on fear is nothing but a suppressed war.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word.

Violence is a tool of the ignorant.

Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.

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

.. jack-booted government thugs.

Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine.

Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate … neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding states…. Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order

One need only watch totalitarians at work to see that once men gain power over other men’s minds, that power is never used sparingly and wisely, but lavishly and brutally and with unspeakable results.

Chaos does not unify. Chaos only serves the most extreme elements of society that seek to destabilize any semblance of order to fulfill their selfish lust for power.

Even in a healthy society, violence, lawlessness, and predation lie just below the surface.

One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.

Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic

The clatter of arms drowns out the voice of law.