Quotes about Resistance

Even if Christians are completely surrounded by sin, they should still fight against it. Some people think they're Christians because they've been baptized. These people give their desires free rein and don't care about conquering their sins. They merely follow their own cravings.

On the other hand, in the presence of tyrants and obstinate opposers, use your liberty in their despite, and with the utmost pertinacity, that they too may understand that they are tyrants, and their laws useless for justification, nay that they had no right to establish such laws.

The world is a head of thistles; whichever way you turn it, it stretches the thorns about itself.

Over against the devil and his missionaries, the authors of false doctrines and sects, we ought to be like the Apostle, impatient, and rigorously condemnatory, as parents are with the dog that bites their little one, but the weeping child itself they soothe.

We should give heed to what has been said by the heathen poet: "Do not yield to evils but proceed more boldly against them."15

Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.

There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up.... The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber.... To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

It is historically and biologically true that there can be no birth and growth without birth and growing pains. Whenever there is the emergence of the new we confront the recalcitrance of the old. So the tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new world order is being born and an old order is passing away.

A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him.

Cassie grabbed at the heavy skillet she had hanging on a peg on the wall, and Red rushed to lift it for her. She whacked at his hands with a wooden spoon. "Don't you have any chores to do outside?" "I'm carrying this frying pan for you." Red pried her fingers off it. "Now tell me where you want it.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

They looked at each other in dismay, and she knew just what he was thinking. He wanted her gone, but he needed her. She wanted to help, but she wanted to do it wearing britches. Neither of them had a hope of getting what they wanted.