Aphorisms — English

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Nonviolence

Ahimsa

Sanskrit word that means "the lack of desire to kill" or further "the absence of all intentions to harm." By extension, Ahimsa is the term for "non-violence."    

1940

The soldier's humanity

Soldiers ! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you ; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel ! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder !

March 13 1962

Peaceful revolutions and violent ones

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

31st March 1968 (Speech), 9th April 1968 (US Congressional Record)

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine."

31st March 1968 (Speech), 9th April 1968 (US Congressional Record)

Remaining Awake Through a triple Revolution

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world." (...)

Jokes are non-violent

Jokes are man’s way to escape violence…

Emo Philips
Source: The Guardian, 29.9.2005