"When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them."
Opponents quotes
Opponents
436 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Opponents quotes (page 2 of 22)
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"Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across."
"The satyagrahi should not have any hatred in his heart against the opponent."
"Success in fighting means not coming at your opponent the way he wants to fight you."
"Lack of fairness to an opponent is essentially a sign of weakness."
"However much I may sympathise with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes."
"A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself."
"To act intelligently in human affairs is only possible if an attempt is made to understand the thoughts, motives, and apprehension of one's opponent so fully that one can see the world through their eyes."
"When your opponent gives you an opening, be swift as a hare."
"If you have a problem and you can't find a solution, you meet again tomorrow and you keep talking until you find a solution. You can disagree with behavior or a particular position, but you do not resort to calling an opponent worthless."
"A genuine satyagraha should never excite contempt in the opponent even when it fails to command regard or respect."
"True ahimsa should wear a smile even on a deathbed brought about by an assailant. It is only with that ahimsa that we can befriend our opponents and win their love."
"Begin by seizing something which your opponent holds dear; then he will be amenable to your will."
"I have never seen opponents so silent about their record, and so desperate to keep their power."
"In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient's condition. Usually this is a member of the family."
"We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent."
"In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning."
"I won't hold my opponent's youth and inexperience against him."
"To injure your opponent is to injure yourself."
"I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst."