The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

I object to violence because, when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. – Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948), in Young India, 1925

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. – George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists