Rigoberta Menchu Quotes

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

I want peace and am willing to fight for it.

I have come to fight for peace, and I will not give my hand to those who try to turn the word 'peace' into a dirty one.

Wars aren't stopped by fighting wars, any more than you can fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. You fight violence with nonviolence.

Christ said: Blessed are the peace-makers, not blessed are the peace-sayers. If the world fell into the hands of totalitarian factions, there is still the possibility that they might fight amongst themselves. Surrender to them would not encourage the kingdom of peace and love - and those that desire it, or with passionate intensity permit it, know not what they do.

Fight the fighters, not their wars.

Let me just say: Peace to you, if you're willing to fight for it.

Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution.

Yoiu have to fight in order to live in peace.

Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We're going to have to struggle. We're going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we're asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don't even understand what peace means.

We must fight for peace bravely as we fought in war.

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.

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

I hold that the world is sick of armed rebellions.

All of us realize that war requires action. What is sometimes harder for us to realize is that peace and neutrality also require action.

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

I don't think there's any way that war can have a place in peace. I think that peace is the active and difficult resistance to the temptation of war; it is the prerogative and the obligation of the injured. Peace is something that has to be vigilantly maintained; it is a vigilance, and it involves temptation, and it does not mean we as human beings are not aggressive. This is a mistaken way of understanding non-violence.

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.

The fragrance of nonviolence was never sweeter than it was today amidst the stink of violence of the most cowardly type that was being displayed in the cities of India.

Just as the world cannot live on wars, so people cannot on revolutions

Our struggle consists in showing that our nonviolence is neither a cloak to hide our violence or hatred, nor a preparation for violence in the near or distant future.

I came to the conclusion that war was an unacceptable way of solving whatever problems there were in the world--that there would be problems of tyranny, of injustice, of nations crossing frontiers and that injustice and tyranny should not be tolerated and should be fought and resisted, but the one thing that must not be used to solve that problem is war. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. And that fact overwhelms whatever moral cause is somewhere buried in the history of that war.

There never was a good war or a bad revolution.