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

After the revolution, it might very well remain necessary to place people where they could not do harm to others. But the one under restraint should be cut off from the rest of society as little as possible.

I learned always to trust my own deep sense of what I should do, and not just obediently trust the judgment of others – even others better than 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.

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.

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

I think that the growing government control of the press is very clear. Turkey is still not a dictatorship, there is still some freedom of the press, but I think it’s moving in the wrong direction.

Each time a Palestinian or an Israeli dies, it is terrible. But they have the right to have a funeral, to be buried, to have a place in the memory of the survivors. And then you have these other places – Darfur, Rwanda.

I often play a move I know how to refute.

Even Colombia – where the dead have no faces and literally cannot be counted. Theirs are minuscule lives moving toward imperceptible deaths. For me, it is the essence of tragedy.

You need to have proper management if you’re going to move forward.

I’ve been back in New York a year and a half now. Before that I was on the West Coast for five years.

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

God will not move unless I say it. Why? because He has made us coworkers with Him. He set things up that way.