Bashir Assad Quotes

Non violence means people in action. People have to understand that with non-violence goes a hell of a lot of organization.

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.

I don't favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.

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

The lyrics stand today (1980). They're still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan. I want to know what you're going to do after you've knocked it all down. I mean, can't we use some of it? What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, change the system. It's no good shooting people.

I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time.

At the meeting I argued that the state had given us no alternative to violence. I said it was wrong and immoral to subject our people to armed attacks by the state without offering them some kind of alternative. I mentioned again that people on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people? If we did not take the lead now, I said, we would soon be latecomers and followers to a movement we did not control.

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

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

I feel that non-violence is really the only way that we can follow because violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the negro community than it solved. We can through violence burn down a building, but you can't establish justice. You can murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. And what we're trying to get rid of is hate, injustice, and all of these other things that continue the long night of man's inhumanity to man.

Indeed the very word, nonviolence, a negative word, means that it is an effort to abandon the violence that is inevitable in life.

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.

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

I hate every violent overthrow, because as much is destroyed as is gained by it.

Resisting is worth doing.

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

Nonviolence is the only way. Even if you achieve your goal by violent means there are always side effects, and these can be worse than the problem. Violence is against human nature.

[People] don't see that there's a great deal of a difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance.

Non-violence ... is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy. I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima. On the contrary, I said to myself, Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.

Please be peaceful. We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence, I want you to love your enemies... for what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just -- and God is with us.

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

Palestinian militancy has accomplished nothing but increasing the misery of the Palestinian people. If Palestinians instead turned more to huge Gandhi-style nonviolence resistance campaigns, the resulting videos would reverberate around the world and Palestine would achieve statehood and freedom.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.

Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.

The world censures those who take up arms to defend their causes and calls on them to use nonviolent means in voicing their grievances. But when a people chooses the nonviolent path, it is all too often the case that hardly anyone pays attention. It is tragic that people have to suffer and die and the television cameras have to deliver the pictures to people's homes every day before the world at large admits there is a problem.