26 Quotes by Gene Sharp

Further, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of their seizure of the state, human rights violations, and brutalities. Without that desperately needed legitimacy, the dictators cannot continue to rule indefinitely.

Liberation from dictatorships ultimately depends on the people's ability to liberate themselves.

By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.

Some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political, or military control over the country.

Whatever promises offered by dictators in any negotiated settlement, no one should ever forget that the dictators may promise anything to secure submission from their democratic opponents, and then brazenly violate those same agreements.

It must be remembered that some groups will ignore any constitutional provision in their aim to establish themselves as new dictators. Therefore, a permanent role will exist for the population to apply political defiance and noncooperation against would-be dictators and to preserve democratic structures, rights, and procedures.

Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are.

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.

Nonviolent struggle is the most powerful means available to those struggling for freedom.