violence quotes

A. J. Muste: 

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

Andre Trocme: 

All who affirm the use of violence admit it is only a means to achieve justice and peace. But peace and justice are nonviolence...the final end of history. Those who abandon nonviolence have no sense of history. Rather they are bypassing history, freezing history, betraying history.

Bishop Desmond Tutu: 

We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.

Colman McCarthy: 

Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.

Isaac Asimov: 

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Jean Goss: 

All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life.

Joan Baez: 

I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier. In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you...because no one has the right to take the life of another human being.

John Ruskin: 

Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

John Ruskin: 

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

Mohandas Gandhi: 

An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

Mohandas Gandhi: 

The Roots of Violence: 
Wealth without work, 
Pleasure without conscience, 
Knowledge without character, 
Commerce without morality, 
Science without humanity, 
Worship without sacrifice, 
Politics without principles.