quotes about Violence

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.
David W. Brooks:
If we are going to stop wars on this earth, we are going to have to make war on hunger our number one priority.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
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 F. Kennedy:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
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 K. Gandhi:
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary, the evil it does is permanent.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.
Mohandas K. 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.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
We must also be careful to avoid ingesting toxins in the form of violent TV programs, video games, movies, magazines, and books. When we watch that kind of violence, we water our own negative seeds, or tendencies, and eventually we will think and act out of those seeds.