Jostein Gaarder Quotes

We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but Martin Luther King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head.

It's the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I'm always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands.

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.

If you give yourself totally to the nonviolence struggle for peace and justice you also find that people give you their hearts and you will never go hungry and never be alone.

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

I ran because I became convinced after King was shot and killed, and Martin Luther King was one of the great heroes of my life, that politics is not perfect but it's the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live. If we don't like how we live, we can participate in the perfect most revolutionary act in a democracy, it's called voting.

A question I would like to present to the world is: Where is the love? And what are we doing? Who's making the decisions that are putting us in the predicaments that we are in, with all of these people losing their lives around the world in so many different ways? I feel like a serious revolution needs to take place in order for human beings to evolve in a way where we can truly exist as a society.

Love IS the People's Power

... we believe in the vocation of communion and participation of our people, who day to day awaken to their political conscience and express their desire for change and profound democratization of society. A change based on justice, built with love, and which will bring us the most anxiously desired fruits of peace.

The law of violence is not a law, but a simple fact which can only be a law when it does not meet with protest and opposition. It is like the cold, darkness and weight, which people had to put up with until recently when warmth, illumination and leverage were discovered.

Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.

Fighting by itself doesn't interest me anymore. I want to help people, the black people and I need any kind of media to spread my thought: God, charity, peace.

The lessons of nonviolence are universal. Not just for America.

You see Martin Luther King is dead and Huey Newton is not. And Malcolm X is dead and Bobby Seale is not. And Vernon Jordan was shot. The thing that revolutionaries, or even people who want to claim they're revolutionaries, often forget is that it doesn't make no difference what kind of wardrobe you wear, and if you speak up about Black people doing better you just risked your life.

The cross to me is complete nonviolence because Jesus said, "Love your enemy. Do not kill." I realized that I could never kill anyone or hurt anyone, but I was committed to trying to bring about social and political and economic change.

My faith in truth and nonviolence is ever growing, and as I am ever trying to follow them in my life, I too am growing every moment.

In the late '60s, people were saying we need power to, not power over. Power to do, accomplish, create, not power over other people.

I hope at least that the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love

I am a revolutionary; my life is dedicated to freeing the people.

I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.

Abraham Lincoln freed the black man. In many ways, Dr. King freed the white man. How did he accomplish this tremendous feat? Where others - white and black - preached hatred, he taught the principles of love and nonviolence.

A lot of people felt defeated and hopeless by Trump's election. But I feel his election should energize people to resist apathy, ignorance, sexism, xenophobia, and racism.

Nothing will end war unless the peoples themselves refuse to go to war.

When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it at which point they can become human too.