Cesar Chavez Quotes

Truth and nonviolence are perhaps the activest forces you have in the world.

My faith in non-co-operation is as bright as ever.

True nonviolence is mightier than the mightiest violence.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time. I'd say, okay, let's get with it, we'll all be nonviolent. But I don't go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody's going to be nonviolent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. If they make the White Citizens Council nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. But as long as you've got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don't want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.

Nonviolence to be a creed has to be all-pervasive.

We have learned that change cannot come through war. War is not a feasible tool to use in fighting against the oppression we face. War has caused more problems. We cannot embrace that path.

The real test of nonviolence lies in its being brought in contact with those who have contempt for it.

Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak... Non-violence is hard work.

Nonviolence with Dr. [Martin Luther ]King is only a method. That's not his objective.

Nonviolence is an unchangeable creed. It has to be pursued even in face of violence raging around you.

The spinning wheel is a symbol of nonviolence for me.

My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI.

Once you follow a path of nonviolence and social justice, it won't take you long before you come into conflict with the culture, with the society. You can't know what is at stake or how much it is going to cost you until you get in the game.

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

If there is no struggle, there is no progress....This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

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

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

No man could be actively nonviolent and not rise against social injustice, no matter where it occurred.

There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest.

Non-violence has suffered its biggest defeat in the hands of people who most want to talk about it.

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.

If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco

I plan to stand by nonviolence, because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice, but also my dealings with people, and with my own self.

Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.