Leo Tolstoy Quotes

My interest in India's freedom will cease if she adopts violent means, for their fruit will not be freedom but slavery in disguise.

I cannot make myself believe that God wanted me to hate. I'm tired of violence, I've seen too much of it. I've seen such hate on the faces of too many sheriffs in the South. And I'm not going to let my oppressor dictate to me what method I must use. Our oppressors have used violence. Our oppressors have used hatred. Our oppressors have used rifles and guns. I'm not going to stoop down to their level. I want to rise to a higher level. We have a power that can't be found in Molotov cocktails.

But nonviolence was never for the oppressor; it was for the oppressed.

With God as witness, I want to proclaim this truth, that the way of violence cannot bring Swaraj, it can only lead to disaster.

We're not really pacifists, we're nonviolent soldiers.

It will be hard to find a parallel in history in which unarmed people have represented the urge for freedom, turning their armlessness into the central means for deliverance.

No power on earth can resist the lovers of liberty who are ready not to kill opponents, but be killed by them.

Nonviolence has come among men and it will live. It is the harbinger of the peace of the world.

Violence is the weapon of the weak.

Nonviolence is the means, the end for everyone is complete independence.

I have repeatedly stated that satyagraha never fails and that one perfect satyagrahi is enough to vindicate Truth.

A truly nonviolent man would never live to tell the tale of atrocities. He would have laid down his life on the spot in non-violent resistance.

Nonviolence in the sense of mere non-killing does not appear to me, therefore, to be of any improvement on the technique of violence.

India's freedom will not be won by violence but only by the purest suffering without retaliation.

Passive resistance is the resistance which does not resist.

As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist

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

Nonviolence is the rock on which the whole structure of non-co-operation is built.

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.

Indeed, a civil resister offers resistance only when peace becomes impossible.

A nonviolent person's life is always at the disposal of him who would take it.

Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.

Nonviolent non-co-operation, I am convinced, is a sacred duty at times.

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

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