Reasons For Choosing To Use Civil Resistance
Some leaders of civil resistance struggles have urged the use of non-violent methods for primarily ethical reasons, while others have emphasized practical considerations. Some have indicated that both of these types of factor have to be taken into account – and that they necessarily overlap.
In his chapter on "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" Martin Luther King gave a notably multi-faceted account of the various considerations, experiences and influences that constituted his "intellectual odyssey to nonviolence". By 1954 this had led to the intellectual conviction that "nonviolent resistance was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their quest for social justice."
In one of her BBC Reith Lectures, first broadcast in July 2011, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy campaigner, stated: "Gandhi’s teachings on non-violent civil resistance and the way in which he had put his theories into practice have become part of the working manual of those who would change authoritarian administrations through peaceful means. I was attracted to the way of non-violence, but not on moral grounds, as some believe. Only on practical political grounds."
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—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
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