Saeb Erekat Quotes

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 talked to Shailene Woodley the next day [after arrest]. She was fine, and she was very happy. She knew that it brought attention to a cause that she cared very much about. She was in high spirits and knew that was a possibility when she was protesting. The people who arrested her, if they were trying to prove a point of not to protest, they only helped the cause.

An awakened people who rely upon their nonviolent strength are independent in the face of any conceivable combination of the armed powers.

The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable.

Gandhi: Ninny of the 20th Century.

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.

I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.

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

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.

A lot of mythology arose after [Mahatma Gandhi] death. But the fact remains that he was an exceptional man, terribly intelligent, with tremendous intuition for people, and a great instinct for what was right.

To make the revolution in the United States is a slow day by day job that requires patience and discipline. It is the only way to make it. . . . All I know is that despite the fact that I am one of the people who benefit from a capitalist society, I find that any system which exploits other people cannot and should not exist.

Violence is a concession to human weakness, satyagraha is an obligation.

The Congress fights not with violent but with nonviolent means, however imperfect, however crude the nonviolence may be.

I think we need to fight against Trumpism in the courts, we need to fight at the ballot box and online, and we need to do peaceful protesting. We need to use every lever at our disposal to make sure that the president doesn't hurt our country, our values, and our people.

Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive.

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience . . . .

It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights.

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

Non-violence is very weak in the theoretical sense; it cannot defend itself. But it is most powerful in the action situation where people are using non-violence because they want desperately to bring about some change. Non-violence in action is a very potent force and it can't be stopped. The people who are struggling have the complete say-so. No man-made law, no human ruler, no army can destroy this. There is no way it can be destroyed... And so, if we have the capacity to endure, if we have the patience, things will change.

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.

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

This tendency to consider only bombings or picking up the gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better,we've called the military error.

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.

People ask me what book politicians should read. They should read the life of Mahatma Gandhi.