Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is widely recognized as an important theorist of peacemaking strategies. He noted in particular that leaders who had been successful at violent strategies were counter-productive in peace time, simply because these strategies now had to be abandoned. But if a movement had adulated and emulated these people, it was unlikely ever to be able to make permanent peace even with those factions it had conquered or dominated, simply because the leaders lacked the skills and had become leaders in part for their suppression of the other side. Accordingly, even if a movement were to benefit from violent action, and even if such action was extremely effective in ending some other oppression, no movement that sought long-term peace could safely hold up these acts or persons as a moral example or advise emulating either. Gandhi's views have influenced modern ethicists in forming a critique of terrorism, in which even those who support the goals must decry the methods and avoid making, for instance, a suicide bomber into a hero.
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Famous quotes containing the word gandhi:
“I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men’s language. Of course women learn it. We’re not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man’s world, so it talks a man’s language.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental non-violence. It has potency which the world does not yet know.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)