Nonviolent struggle is the most powerful means available to those struggling for freedom.

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.

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.

Further, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of their seizure of the state, human rights violations, and brutalities. Without that desperately needed legitimacy, the dictators cannot continue to rule indefinitely.

Contrary to popular opinion, even totalitarian dictatorships are dependent on the population and the societies they rule.

Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are.

There should be no romanticism that international public opinion or even international diplomatic and economic pressure can defeat a coup without determined and strong defense by the attacked society itself