Andrew Young Quotes

I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.

Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.

Power to the peaceful!

Don't stand back with your arms folded; step forward... There is hope and light to resist injustice and promote peace without violence.

Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?

The thing that started the peace movement in Ireland was anger - my anger. It wasn't anger; it was fury.

People must lean the strategies of non-violence as a skill for use in their homes, their work and in making social change….Violence is an inarticulate language.

If you athletes boycott the Olympics, it will be like a rock dropping in the water. The ripples and waves will be felt all over. You can be that rock. No one will die and that is the way to fight.

Nonviolence is the only credible response to the violence we're seeing around the world.

Following the teaching of Gandhi and Thoreau, Dr. King, it set me on a path. And I never looked back.

Maybe it's because my uncle and my parents were always very involved with the civil rights movement, so I just grew up and I was raised that you have to speak out and look out for your fellow man, woman, and child.

Change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

My work has always been rooted in nonviolence, as espoused by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

We are rooted in Kingian nonviolence.

One of the things I loved - or I love still - about this Occupy movement is it's got a very gentle core. I mean, it's really decidedly nonviolent in the face of all kinds of situations.

[A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.

I don't have much time for real violence at all. I think there are infinitely better ways of changing the world than using violence. Sitting round a table talking is a pretty good start.

We are living in a time of many wars. The call for peace must be shouted. Peace sometimes gives the impression of being quiet, but it is never quiet. Peace if always proactive and dynamic.

There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest.

Somebody must have sense enough to meet hate with love. Somebody must have sense enough to meet physical force with soul force. If we will but try this way, we will be able to change these conditions and yet at the same time win the hearts and souls of those who have kept these conditions alive a way as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth, as modern as the techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi. There is another way.

When I was 16, the guest speaker was King. And I was completely overwhelmed because I had been studying nonviolence, talking about it, reading about it, but here it was happening, here it was people boycotting the buses and people on the streets and taking risks, which I think was the key.

I will not call myself a pacifist for the very simple reason that if something like a [Francisco] Franco should arise in Spain again, or, for that matter, in America, and tried to take away whatever dwindling civil liberties and human rights we retain, I would resist them with a club if I had to. But my admiration for pacifism as an outlook and a sensibility is enormous. I just find that it gets me into contradictions, as it often gets many pacifists into contradictory positions and strategies.

It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights.

The way I'm going now is to focus on peace, to create peace. As Sister Corita said, "I don't go to anti-war rallies. I go to peace rallies."