The principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites-Acquiescence and violence -while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.
Interpretation
Nonviolent resistance aims to find a balance between passivity and aggression in addressing conflicts.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. highlights the philosophy underpinning nonviolent resistance, which seeks a middle ground between acquiescence, or passivity, and violence, or aggression. King's approach advocates for a moral and effective strategy that rejects both extremes, promoting justice and reconciliation without resorting to harm.
In practice
In a lecture on social justice, one might quote this to illustrate a balanced approach to activism.
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
Music is the best consolation for a despaired man
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Israel... is one of the great outpost of democracy in the world
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?
Aggression only moves in one direction - it creates more aggression.
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?
If ye despise the human race, and mortal arms, yet remember that there is a God who is mindful of right and wrong.
It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.
The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.
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