The most effective and positive benefit of having a constructive program is that your program becomes the scaffolding on which you're going to build a new society. If your movement has a long-term goal of complete replacement of regime, then you can strategically graduate from issues which are the easiest to succeed at, to issues which are the hardest, gathering strength as you go along.

There's no question that art plays a role. It can affect our imagination and our way of seeing the world. 

Because Gandhi, after all, called nonviolence not only a force, but the greatest power mankind has been endowed with. And I think that this is true. And I think it's true because nonviolence is in some way the core of our nature. It's a core of what makes us human. 

I failed to realize that the vast majority of people, even in a progressive environment, such as what Berkeley claimed itself to be – I sometimes wonder – there was a tremendous fear of disruption without constructive program. And that took me years, really, after the movement to learn. That you have to not only incorporate but lead with constructive program. Meaning, what are you going to build and not just what you are going to tear down?

In these examples, you see how the conversion of a person from a state of anger and fear to a state of what Marshall Frady called a forgiving love, actually does seem to have an impact on the entire emotional-spiritual consciousness environment and affects the outcome of a situation and changes the minds of others.

If you can somehow compass a success without a conquest, you will not have alienated your previous opponent. And that means that you will have built closer relationships, and we should remember that this is always a goal of nonviolent action.

Nonviolence, to be practiced with effect, requires training and preparation and strategy. It requires astuteness in understanding your situation. And underneath, giving life to all of that, an understanding that every one of us has an instinct towards the feeling that what happens to our fellow human beings in some way also happens to us.