People may find it more comfortable to listen to us if we equivocate, but in the long run only words that discomfort them are going to change our situation.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.

Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one's fears.

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other - in balance with it... The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

Nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. In them the two impulses that have long been treated as distinct, 'masculine' and 'feminine,' the impulse of self-assertion and the impulse of sympathy, are clearly joined; the very genius of nonviolence, in fact, is that it demonstrates them to be indivisible, and so restores human community.

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision. . . is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.