Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was the preeminent leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India. Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahatma—applied to him first in 1914 in South Africa,—is now used worldwide. He is also called Bapuin India. In common parlance in India he is often called Gandhiji. He is unofficially called the Father of the Nation...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionCivil Rights Leader
Date of Birth2 October 1869
CityPortbandar, India
CountryIndia
Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.
The lives of Zoroaster, Jesus and Mohammed, as I have understood them, have illumined many a passage in the Gita.
Tolstoy's so-called inconsistencies were a sign of his development and his passionate regard for truth.
In the march towards Truth, anger, selfishness, hatred, etc., naturally give way, for otherwise Truth would be impossible to attain. A man who is swayed by passions may have good enough intentions, may be truthful in word, but he will never find the Truth.
Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms.
The function of violence is to obtain reform by external means, the function of passive resistance, that is, soul-force, is to obtain it by growth from within, which, in its turn, is obtained by self-suffering, self-purification.
My mother would tell me that the shortest cut to purification after the unholy touch was to cancel the touch by touching any Mussalman passing by.
Passive resistance seeks to rejoin politics and religion and to test all our actions in the light of ethical principles.
To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions.
Nonviolence of the strong cannot be a mere policy. It must be a creed, or a passion, if 'creed' is objected to.
A man who wants to control his animal passions easily does so if he controls his palate.
Love based upon indulgence of animal passion, is at best a selfish affair, and likely to snap under the slightest strain.
Who can deny that much that passes for science and art today destroys the soul instead of uplifting it and instead of evoking the best in us, panders to our basest passions?
If we know how much passive violence we perpetrate against one another, we will understand why there is so much physical violence plaguing societies and the world.