“Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.”

The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.

A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.

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

Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.

We cannot live without our lives

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

To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.

Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

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

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try – by punishing the troublesome – to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.

There should be no censorship of mail.

The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.

The free man must be born before freedom can be won, and the brotherly man must be born before full brotherhood can be won. It will come into being only if we build it out of our very muscle and bone – by trying to act it out.

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.

there is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one’s whole being in the determination: this must change.

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.

I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.

That moment I felt a bit like crying. I don’t really know why. Nana’s hand felt so warm that it even warmed my heart.

When we’re in our true being, the purpose of life is to feel that every moment is the purpose.

I think this is a moment of a lot of possibilities, and openings. Occupy and the 99% movement are really going to break through, and we are going to create a new economy.

If my tears spilled spontaneously at that moment it’s because I immediately understood that what was happening, like in a dream, was the treat you had prepared for me I felt your friendship much stronger than if you had thanked me a million times that what pleased and touched me.

This week, the world gathers in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic games. This is the extraordinary moment China has been dreaming of for 100 years.

In order to learn, comprehend and rediscover that I can be and I want to be better at every moment.

So, I’m an old fashioned still in this regard but these are the moment where I really can be creative, if I am, to be left alone with just a book and piece of paper and to be thinking.