Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.

Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.

The point is to change one's life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now.

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.

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.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

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