Civil Resistance Quotes

The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i.e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organization and agitation, destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population, and spreading both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle against the autocracy.

It is my duty to leave nothing undone that I may lawfully do, to pull down this administration....

A community has not ceased to be essentially law-abiding merely because it refuses to practice literal obedience. There is such a thing as orderly disobedience to a statute, a disobedience which is open, frankly avowed, and in conformity with the general sense of what is reasonable

There is a need for a movement of non-violent direct action.

There is no more democratic government than a revolutionary government.

When citizens have no political way to deal with revolution, they become counter-revolutionary.

… only through stopping every measure of force on the part of the government—not only the executions, but the arrests and banishments—could this fearful, animal-like fight of a people be stopped.

In the sixties, during the Vietnam war, when anarchists and pacifists and socialists, Democrats and Republicans, decent-hearted Americans, all recoiled with horror at the bloodbath, we came together.

You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.

If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.

I think leaders are incapable of the strength that passive resistance entails.

Civil disobedience's main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

I do believe that if millions of people do stand up and fight back, we can stop Donald Trump from doing some really awful things.

The only true resistance to this Government... [is] to cease to co-operate with it.

Government doesn’t always work the way its supposed to. Sometimes you have to use brute force, bring people together …

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.

Nonviolent action means mobilization of world opinion in our favour.

The point is change can come about, but it only comes about when millions of people are actively involved in political struggle, the billionaires may have the money, but we have the people.

The independence project in Catalonia is... a peaceful revolution, carried out in suit, shirt, and tie.

Time and again, attempts by machine-age armies to impose their will on irregular forces supported by a sympathetic population failed.

We must consider teaching the Egyptian revolution in schools.

To fight against the government with any means is a basic right and sport of every German.

The Orange Revolution was a powerful example of democracy around the world. The people of Ukraine are continuing to shape their own future.

A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.

All governments abuse power. Every one of them. It's the duty of citizens to resist those abuses.