Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

Since satyagraha is a method of conversion and conviction, it seeks never to use the slightest coercion.

Our aim is not to do things by violence to opponents.

My satyagrahi spirit tells me that I may not retaliate.

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

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.

Satyagraha has been designed as an effective substitute for violence.

The Indian government has managed to turn the concept of nonviolence on its head. Nonviolent resistance and nonviolent governance. Unlike, say, China or Turkey or Indonesia, India doesn't mow down its people. It doesn't kill people who are refusing to move. It just waits it out. It continues to do what it has to do and ignores the consequences.

Nonviolence or soul force does not need physical aids for its propagation of effect.

Whatever strength the masses have is due entirely to ahimsa, however imperfect or defective its practice might have been.

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

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

The nonviolence I teach is active nonviolence of the strongest. But the weakest can partake in it without becoming weaker.

For mass struggles, nonviolence is essential.

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

My method is conversion, not coercion, it is self-suffering, not the suffering of the tyrant. I know that method to be infallible.

The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain.

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.

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.

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

It is nonviolent non-co-operation which evokes the highest spirit of self-sacrifice that will wean one from the error of one's ways.

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.

Nonviolence is a universal law acting under all circumstances.

Nonviolence, applied to very large masses of mankind, is a new experiment in the history of the world.

A satyagrahi exhausts all other means before he resorts to satyagraha.