A Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Satyagraha and civil disobedience and fasts have nothing in common with the use of force, veiled or open.

Mahatma Gandhi

Quote Topics

Civil Civil Disobedience Common Disobedience Force Nothing Open Satyagraha Use Use Of Force

Quote Author

Mahatma Gandhi
Indian - Leader
October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948

The state says: "Well, in order for it to be legitimate civil disobedience, you have to follow these rules." They put us in "free-speech zones"; they say you can only do it at this time, and in this way, and you can't interrupt the functioning of the government. They limit the impact that civil disobedience can achieve. We have to remember that civil disobedience must be disobedience if it's to be effective.

Edward Snowden

Satyagraha does not begin and end with civil disobedience.

Mahatma Gandhi

Satyagraha is an opera which I wrote for the Netherlands Opera, so it uses an orchestra of around fifty, a chorus of forty, and there are about seven soloists. The opera ... Satyagraha means truthful, so it was a name [Mahatma] Gandhi used to describe his civil disobedience movement.

Philip Glass

Non-co-operation and civil disobedience are but different branches of the same tree called satyagraha.

Mahatma Gandhi

It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.

B. R. Ambedkar

Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.

Howard Zinn

There is no "playing with truth" in the Charkha programme, for satyagraha is not predominantly civil disobedience but a quiet and irresistible pursuit of Truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

Civil disobedience presupposes willing obedience of our self-imposed rules, and without it civil disobedience would be a cruel joke.

Mahatma Gandhi

Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play.

Al Gore

Yes, what has happened is we have moved from responding to these terrorist attacks as acts of civil disobedience to getting to the point after September 11 that we said, no, this is not just civil disobedience, this is an act of war.

Marsha Blackburn

If Snowden really claims that his actions amounted to genuine civil disobedience, he should go to some English language bookstore in Moscow and get a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience'.

Michael Hayden

Disobedience to be civil has to be open and nonviolent.

Mahatma Gandhi

The libertarian approach is a very symmetrical one: the non-aggression principle does not rule out force, but only the initiation of force. In other words, you are permitted to use force only in response to some else's use of force. If they do not use force you may not use force yourself. There is a symmetry here: force for force, but no force if no force was used.

Stephan Kinsella

Active nonviolence is necessary for those who will offer civil disobedience but the will and proper training are enough for the people to co-operate with those who are chosen for civil disobedience.

Mahatma Gandhi

For satyagraha and its offshoots, non-co-operation and civil resistance, are nothing but new names for the law of suffering.

Mahatma Gandhi