A Quote by Jerry Vlasak

I think that violence and nonviolence are not moral principles, they’re tactics.

Jerry Vlasak

Quote Topics

Moral Moral Principles Nonviolence Principles Tactics Think Violence

Quote Author

Jerry Vlasak
American - Activist
Born: 1958

Part of the reason I embrace nonviolence is that it's the most effective thing we can do. It's a more advanced tactic than violence. If people who engage in violence want to escalate their tactics, they would escalate to nonviolence.

Tim DeChristopher

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.

Mahatma Gandhi

To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.

Michael Shermer

Today’s world is traveling in some strange direction. You see that the world is going toward destruction and violence. And the specialty of violence is to create hatred among people and to create fear. I am a believer in nonviolence and I say that no peace or tranquility will descend upon the people of the world until nonviolence is practiced, because nonviolence is love and it stirs courage in people.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

The essence of nonviolence is love. Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies, tactics, and techniques for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally. Nonviolence is not a dogma; it is a process.

Nhat Hanh

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Catholic Church, though I think it's important that people grow up with moral values, I just always disagreed with their tactics, which I thought were fright tactics, as opposed to sitting down and explaining the situation.

Ronnie James Dio

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Veganism is about nonviolence: nonviolence to other sentient beings; nonviolence to yourself; nonviolence to the earth.

Gary L. Francione

Peace is the alternative to war, and nonviolence should be seen as the antidote to violence, not simply as its opposite. Nonviolence is more concerned with saving life than with saving face.

Jesse Jackson

So many people around the world have used nonviolence as a way to resolve a conflict that they faced in their lives. And they continue to use it everywhere all over the world there. And I think, in a way, nonviolence is our nature. Violence is not really our nature. If violence was our nature, we wouldn't need military academies and martial arts institutes to teach us how to kill and destroy people. We ought to have been born with those instincts. But the fact that we have to learn the art of killing means that it's a learned experience. And we can always unlearn it.

Arun Manilal Gandhi

Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for non-violence. Violence does not mean the emancipation from fear, but discovering the means of combating the cause of fear. Nonviolence, on the other hand, has no cause for fear. The votary of nonviolence has to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice of the highest type in order to be free from fear. He recks not if he should lose his land, his wealth, his life.

Mahatma Gandhi

We are convinced that non-violence is more powerful than violence. We are convinced that non-violence supports you if you have a just and moral cause...If you use violence, you have to sell part of yourself for that violence. Then you are no longer a master of your own struggle.

Cesar Chavez

Absolute hospitality would in no way amount to the absence of violence. To the contrary, it would enthrone violence precisely under the guise of nonviolence because it would leave the violators unchanged and the consequences of violence unremedied.