Quotes about Nonviolence

It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

With utmost courage, Jesus taught a gospel of nonviolence. Is the church today practicing the same by its presence and behavior? Do the churches practice nonviolence and social justice, or do they align themselves with governments that practice violence and hatred?

Please be peaceful. We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence, I want you to love your enemies... for what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just -- and God is with us.

Violence is for those who have lost their imagination.

Violence is for those who have lost their imagination. Has your country lost its imagination?

Violence is often the instrument of those who are impatient, those who lack imagination, those who cannot wait on justice or freedom or redemption.

Limiting violence was a good place to start. Abolishing it is a good place to end.

Second-century Bible scholar Origen of Alexandria wrote, "We do not arm ourselves against any nation; we do not learn the art of war; because, through Jesus Christ, we have become the children of peace.

It is here that we see a Jesus who abhors both passivity and violence, who carves out a third way that is neither submission nor assault, neither fight nor flight. It is this third way, Wink writes, that teaches that "evil can be opposed without being mirrored . . . oppressors can be resisted without being emulated . . . enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed."7

Violence is for those who have lost their imagination. Has

The way of Jesus is not a proposal for how to take over the nation-state and make it Christian. It is, rather, a lesson in learning not to take over--to be a community where we find a new way of life by giving ourselves for others.

Andre Trocmé, who pastored the remarkable Le Chambon community during World War II, said, "Nonviolence was not a theory superimposed upon reality; it was an itinerary that we explored day after day in communal prayer and in obedience to the commands of the Spirit.