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Noam Chomsky

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States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.

 
Noam Chomsky

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Ours is not a drive for power, but purely a non-violent fight for India’s independence. In a violent struggle, a successful general has been often known to effect a military coup and to set up a dictatorship. But under the Congress scheme of things, essentially non-violent as it is, there can be no room for dictatorship. A non-violent soldier of freedom will covet nothing for himself, he fights only for the freedom of his country.

 
Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi
 

Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations. When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority.

 
Martin Luther King
 

Yeah, I've got violence in me, but no negative violence. My violence is the violence of the free man who refuses to knuckle under. Creation is violent. Life is violent. Birth is a violent process. Tempests and earthquakes are violent movements of nature. My violence is the violence of life. It is not violence against nature, like the violence of the state, which sends your kids to the slaughterhouse, deadens your minds, and drives out your souls!

 
Klaus Kinski
 

State and government are the social apparatus of violent coercion and repression. Such an apparatus, the police power, is indispensable in order to prevent anti-social individuals and bands from destroying social co-operation. Violent prevention and suppression of anti-social activities benefit the whole of society and each of its members. But violence and oppression are none the less evils and corrupt those in charge of their application. It is necessary to restrict the power of those in office lest they become absolute despots. Society cannot exist without an apparatus of violent coercion. But neither can it exist if the office holders are irresponsible tyrants free to inflict harm upon those they dislike.

 
Ludwig von Mises
 

Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote that you cannot commit an act of violence against a non-sentient object. Back in 1986, the Green Party of Canada tried to toss me out of the Party for sinking whaling ships on the ground that it was a violent act. I pointed out that the Green Party of Canada supported violence when it was convenient politically - for example they supported and continue to support abortion which is, like it or not, a violent act, certainly more violent than sinking some metal into the sea. Violence is not violent when we justify it, be it abortion, or war, or eating meat for example. I support abortion but I'm not a hypocrite about it - it's violent, I accept that. Every American taxpayer accepts the violence that their tax-dollars fund.

 
Paul Watson
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