Gandhi on Non-Violence Quotes

“Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“The first principal of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“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”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“Cuida tus pensamientos, porque se convertirán en tus palabras. Cuida tus palabras, porque se convertirán en tus actos. Cuida tus actos, porque convertirán en tus hábitos. Cuida tus hábitos, porque se convertirán en tu destino.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate. p. 21”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the material cosmos. Science without wisdom leaves man enslaved to a world of unrelated objects in which there is no way of discovering (or creating) order and deep significance in man's own pointless existence. (p. 4)”
― Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“A society that lives by organized greed or by systemic terrorism and oppression (they come too much the same thing in the end) will always tend to be violent because it is in a state of persistent disorder and moral confusion. The first principle of valid political action in such a society then becomes non-cooperation with its disorder, its injustices, and more particularly with its deep commitment to untruth."

(from Thomas Merton's introduction to Gandhi on Non-Violence, pg 9. Italics original.)”
― Gandhi, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down. Any society which is geared for violent action is by that very fact systematically unreasonable and in articulate."

(from Thomas Merton's introduction to Gandhi on Non-Violence, pg 7)”
― Gandhi, Gandhi on Non-Violence

“It cannot too often be repeated that with him non-violence was not a simply marginal and quasi-fanatical indulgence of personal religious feeling. It belonged to the very nature of political life, and a society whose politics are habitually violent, inarticulate, and unreasonable is a subpolitical and therefore subhuman society.

(from Thomas Merton's introduction to Gandhi on Non-Violence, pg 8. Italics original)”
― Gandhi, Gandhi on Non-Violence