Mohandas Gandhi's Views About Nonviolence—Essay
Many writers and thinkers have written essays to share their opinions. Essays are short pieces of writing in which authors express their point of view about something. In the following excerpt from an essay, Mohandas Gandhi writes of the strength of nonviolence as a means for social change.
Primary Source
Non-violence is a weapon of the strong…. My daily experience…is that every problem lends itself to solution if we are determined to make the law of truth and non-violence the law of life. For truth and non-violence are, to me, faces of the same coin.
Excerpt from “My Faith in Non-violence,” an essay published in Mohandas K. Gandhi's Non-Violent Resistance, Schocken Books, New York, 1969.
Background
Mohandas Gandhi was a great leader who helped India become independent from Great Britain. Also known as Mahatma or “great soul,” Gandhi's success as a leader was rooted in his firm belief in nonviolence. He used peaceful demonstrations and hunger strikes to get attention for his cause. Hunger strikes happen when people refuse to eat as a form of protest. Millions of people in India and around the world were moved by his efforts. Gandhi proved that peaceful resistance could be a powerful force of change.
