Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

The true source of rights is duty.

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

I don't favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

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.

Nonviolent resistance makes it possible for the Negro to remain in the South and struggle for his rights. The Negro's problem will not be solved by running away.

The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

No people have risen who thought only of rights. Only those did so who thought of duties.

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Civil disobedience is the right of all men when we believe breaking man's law is needed to preserve God's law.

Property has its duties as well as its rights…. To the neglect of these duties in times past is mainly to be attributed to that diseased state of society in which such crimes can take their rise…. It is not in the enactment of statutes of extraordinary severity, but chiefly in the better and more faithful performance of those duties … that a permanent remedy … is to be sought.

We're losing our way as a society. If we don't stand up, if we don't say what we think those rights should be, and if we don't protect them, we will very soon find out that we do not have them.

In giving rights to others which belong to them, we give rights to ourselves and to our country

Civil disobedience is the only nonviolent escape from the soul-destroying heat of violence.

I cannot make myself believe that God wanted me to hate. I'm tired of violence, I've seen too much of it. I've seen such hate on the faces of too many sheriffs in the South. And I'm not going to let my oppressor dictate to me what method I must use. Our oppressors have used violence. Our oppressors have used hatred. Our oppressors have used rifles and guns. I'm not going to stoop down to their level. I want to rise to a higher level. We have a power that can't be found in Molotov cocktails.

I think violence is counter-productive and it is bad in democratic societies.

That is a lie. I'm not for wanton violence, I'm for justice.

Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.

Sometimes when we're incensed by the rancid tide of injustice, the impulse is to attack. We must avoid this. We have learned that violence as a means is always unsuccessful.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

Civil disobedience is the assertion of a right which law should give but which it denies.

We will stand against violence and intimidation. We will stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings.

Pressure or violence will ever move us to relinquish our honor or our equality of rights.

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

There's no reason to be non-violent. There's no challenge unless you are living for people.