Henry David Thoreau Quotes

If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.... If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better

Nonviolence in politics is a new weapon in the process of evolution; its vast possibilities are yet unexplored.

I organized tax resistance in 1965, with a friend. I kept at it for about ten years. I don't see it as a principle, it's a tactic. And I felt I had exhausted its potential as a tactic right about then, so I stopped.

Nonviolence is not a weapon of the weak. It is a weapon of the strongest and bravest.

Dissociate yourselves from the satanic administration, and you will bring it to its knees. You will not have to lift a finger, let alone a stick or stone.

Civil disobedience has almost always been about expression. Generally, it's nonviolent, as defined by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.

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

Our peaceful non-co-operation must be constructive, non-destructive. Poison should not emerge from the throes of love.

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.

The use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which makes reforms without violence possible.

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

I believe in civil disobedience among other forms of resistance in times when it's called for.

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

[A.J. Muste] never engaged in violence but he believed, as [Mahatma] Gandhi did - and he knew Gandhi slightly - he believed that a pacifist had to be active in the community.

Disobedience to be civil has to be open and nonviolent.

Nonviolent non-co-operation is the only alternative to anarchy and worse.

The weapon of nonviolence does not need supermen or superwomen to wield it; even beings of common clay can use it and have used it before this with success.

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

There is nothing but nonviolence to fall back upon for retaining our freedom, even as we had to do for gaining it.

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.

History has no record of a nation having adopted nonviolent resistance.

The principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites-Acquiescence and violence -while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.