That is straight out of Gandhi. If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble. … If you fight with violence, you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.

By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.

So, he reasoned, if you can identify the sources of a government's power - people working in civil service, police and judges, even the army - then you know what a dictatorship depends on for its existence.

Some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political, or military control over the country.

You have a chance of learning -- if you want to and youre not arrogant.

As soon as you choose to fight with violence you're choosing to fight against your opponents best weapons and you have to be smarter than that.

There’s one thing that’s been 'learned' maybe from Tunisia and Egypt that I think is a mistake. And that is that the existing ruler has to resign. He doesn’t have to resign. You take all the supports out from under him; he falls. No matter what he wants to do. This is the distinction in the analyses between nonviolent coercion in which he has to resign, but he’s forced into it, and disintegration when the regime simply falls apart. There’s nobody left with enough power to resign.