Gene Sharp Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

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

Gene Sharp
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.

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

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.

Gene Sharp
Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors.

Gene Sharp
Contrary to popular opinion, even totalitarian dictatorships are dependent on the population and the societies they rule.

Gene Sharp
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.

Gene Sharp
The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic, and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression.

Gene Sharp
Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.

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

Gene Sharp
Nonviolent action involves opposing the opponent's power, including his police & military capacity, not with the weapons chosen by him but by quite different means...Repression by the opponent is used against his own power position in a kind of political " ju-jitsu " and the very sources of his power thus reduced or removed, with the result that his political and military position is seriously weakened or destroyed.

Gene Sharp