David T. Dellinger Quotes

Commitment to nonviolence must not be based on patient acquiescence in intolerable conditions. Rather, it stems from a deeper knowledge of the self-defeating, self-corrupting effect of lapses into violence.

Nonviolence is supremely the weapon of the dispossessed, the underprivileged, and the egalitarian, not those who are still addicted to private profit, commercial values, and great wealth.

This is a diseased world in which it is impossible for anyone to be fully human. One way or another, everyone who lives in the modern world is sick or maladjusted.

There is a heady sense of manhood that comes from advancing from apathy to commitment, from timidity to courage, from passivity to aggressiveness. There is an intoxication that comes from standing up to the police at last.

Nonviolence simply cannot defend property rights over human rights.

Arms control is by definition a rejection of disarmament.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace.

Our experience of the governments of the world, our knowledge of the weapons at their disposal, and our awareness of our own limitations justify pessimism. But some mysterious factor deep in the human psyche has produced a countervailing conviction that educating, organizing, uniting, and acting will make a difference.