Civil Disobedience Quotes

1. "King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience."
Author: Constance Baker Motley

2. "I believe that Gandhi was correct. Non-violent civil disobedience is the only way to bring about change that allows people to enjoy the change and not get killed in the process."
Author: Edward James Olmos

3. "The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.' - On Civil Disobedience in 1969"
Author: Hannah Arendt

4. "The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people's struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back."
Author: Howard Zinn

5. "Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it...In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did."
Author: Howard Zinn

6. "I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it."
Author: Martin Sheen

7. "My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI."
Author: Martin Sheen

8. "A dog can bite you but you must not bite the dog! Your every movement in life must be peaceful; otherwise you lose your ethical superiority! Nonviolent civil disobedience is a genius; no power can beat it; use it when necessary!"
Author: Mehmet Murat Ildan

9. "The rhetoric of ‘law and order' was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely ‘rewarding lawbreakers.' For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime."
Author: Michelle Alexander

10. "I am at a crossroads; I have always been against armed opposition... I have chosen civil disobedience. But I will apologize to my people if there are funerals coming out of prisons. I will criticize myself and I won't be the mayor of Diyarbakir."
Author: Osman Baydemir

11. "There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, 'New Museum,' to be an act of civil disobedience. It's not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It's painting as insurgency."
Author: Richard Phillips

12. "Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights."
Author: Sonia Johnson

13. "It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights."
Author: Tariq Ali

Civil Disobedience Quotes Pictures