Top 100 Resistance Quotes To Fight For What You Believe In

Resistance means going against the flow of a process that is not deemed fair.

When you resist something, it is because you feel strongly against it and are vocal about it. This takes a lot of courage and will to instill this confidence.

Everywhere change is needed, and change is coming every day. Some people oppose change. They resist change, and hence, it gets tricky. When things are at grassroots levels, this is okay. But when the resistance increases in intensity, things can heat up pretty quickly, leading to social movements and wars for civil rights. The best example of this is the Black Lives Matter protest that took place in 2020.

Below, we have collected resistance quotes. You might find black lives matter quotes, Steven Pressfield resistance quotes, black activist quotes, French resistance quotes, and more.

If you liked reading these quotes, you could also check rebel quotes or protest quotes.
 

Here we have collected all the resistance quotes for you to read.

1. "I believe in the magic and authority of words."

- René Char.

2. "Out of resistance comes strength."

- Napoleon Hill.

3. "Peace without justice is tyranny."

- William Allen White.

4. "The path of least resistance is what makes rivers run crooked."

-  Elbert Hubbard.

5. "Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself."

- Carl Jung.

6. "Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions that are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof...near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry."

- Carl Sagan.

7. "I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage."

- Friedrich Nietzsche.

8. "When in doubt, choose change."

- Lily Leung.

9. "Everything is love, so the only thing that’s not love is our resistance to love is us trying to be separate from the world."

- Jason Mraz.

10. "There is resistance to change. There’s a resistance to ideas."

- Abdullah II of Jordan.

11. "If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again."

- Malcolm X.

12. "Resistance to oppression is second nature."

- Seneca The Younger.

13. "My mama used to tell me, “If you can’t find somethin’ to live for, you best find something’ to die for."

- Tupac Shakur.

14. "A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."

-  G. K. Chesterton.

15. "On the field of The Self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon."

- Steven Pressfield.

16. "The external resistance may also be varied."

- Alexander Graham Bell.

17. "The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs."

- John Dewey.

18. "Change before you have to."

- Jack Welch.

19. "Move with the flow. Don’t fight the current. Resist nothing. Let life carry you. Don’t try to carry it."

- Oprah Winfrey.

20. "Art begins with resistance – at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor."

- Andre Gide.

Here you will find quotations on injustice and resistance to civil government quotes.

21. "It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end."

- Leonardo da Vinci.

22. "Resistance at all cost is the most senseless act there is."

- Friedrich Durrenmatt.

23. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. "

- John F. Kennedy.

24. "You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw."

-  Vladimir Lenin.

25. "Suffering = Pain x Resistance"

- Shinzen Young.

26. "This property of human languages—their resistance to algorithmic processing— is perhaps the ultimate reason why only mathematics can furnish an adequate language for physics."

- Yuri I. Manin.

27. "I have fought fire with fire...and I ought to have done it sooner!"

- Gregory Maguire.

28. "Our only security is our ability to change."

- John Lilly.

29. "The strength and power of despotism consist wholly in fear of resistance."

- Thomas Paine.

30. "The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character."

- Arnold Schwarzenegger.

31. "Where there is power, there is resistance."

- Michel Foucault.

32. "Resistance to criminal rashness comes better late than never."

- Livy.

33. "Victory will never be found by taking the path of least resistance."

- Winston Churchill.

34. "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

-  Benjamin Franklin.

35. "Resistance by definition is self-sabotage."

- Steven Pressfield.

This section is about resist quotes and the path of least resistance quotes.

36. "When we touch matter, we only really experience sensations of resistance, implying repulsive force."

- Alfred Russel Wallace.

37. "It seems that most people need to experience a great deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and accept - before they will forgive."

- Eckhart Tolle.

38. "Things do not change; we change."

- Henry David Thoreau.

39. "Resistance is a powerful motivator precisely because it enables us to fulfill our longing to achieve our goals while letting us boldly recognize and name the obstacles to those achievements."

- Derrick Bell.

40. "The way I lived my life, I truly wasn’t an active resistance fighter."

- Angela Merkel.

41. "You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."

- Henrik Ibsen, 'An Enemy Of The People'.

42. "The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary."

- Gloria Steinem.

43. "A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect."

- W.E.B. Du Bois.

44. "I respect only those who resist me, but I cannot tolerate them."

-  Charles de Gaulle.

45. "Resistance is the subtlest form of attachment."

- Eric Micha'el Leventhal.

46. "The foregoing considerations lead us to the very important conclusion, that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force."

- Alfred Russel Wallace.

47. "Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations."

- Brother Lawrence.

48. "Slowness to change usually means fear of the new."

- Philip Crosby.

49. "Resistance is essentially a form of coevolution that occurs when a given population is threatened with extinction."

- Michael Pollan.

50. "Dr. King used Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance."

- Al Sharpton.

51. "I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light."

- Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale'.

Here you will find quotes about resistance movements and more.

52. "The resistance of a woman is not always a proof of her virtue, but more frequently of her experience."

- Ninon de L'Enclos.

53. "Truth is powerful and it prevails."

- Sojourner Truth.

54. "It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."

-  Albert Camus.

55. "Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does."

- Terry Tempest Williams.

56. "To speak of this subject you must...explain the nature of the resistance of the air, in the second the anatomy of the bird and its wings."

- Leonardo DaVinci.

57. "If you’ve got a head, you’ve got a voice of Resistance inside it."

- Steven Pressfield.

58. "Changing is what people do when they have no options left."

- Holly Black.

59. "True resistance begins with people confronting pain…and wanting to do something to change it."

- Bell Hooks.

60. "What I can’t tell is, I don’t know if there’s a subliminal resistance to the idea of a sequel to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ anyway."

- Andrew Lloyd Webber.

61. "After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was."

- Terry Eagleton, 'Why Marx Was Right'.

62. "There is no way a spirit of resistance that has sunk so deep in the population can be repressed."

- Oliver Tambo.

63. "Corn can’t expect justice from a court composed of chickens."

- African proverb.

64. "Resist much, obey little."

-  Walt Whitman.

65. "The history of liberty is a history of resistance."

- Woodrow Wilson.

66. "A millennium of peace would not breed the fighting disposition out of our bone and marrow, and a function so ingrained and vital will never consent to die without resistance."

William James.

67. "Research can become resistance. We want to work, not prepare for work."

- Steven Pressfield.

68. "If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change. If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change."

- John A. Simone, Sr.

69. "The path of least resistance will never make you proud."

- Tony Robbins.

70. "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

— Mark Twain

71. "People don't resist change. They resist being changed."

- Peter Senge.

72. "The path of least resistance is the path of the loser."

- H. G. Wells.

This section is all about nonviolent resistance quotes, Gandhi quotes on peaceful resistance, and more.

73. "A riot is the language of the unheard."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

74. "We have to knock, knock on our destiny, to open the door, to escape!"

-  Nikos Kazantzakis.

75. "Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work."

- Steven Pressfield.

76. "We won't argue; you're wrong."

- William Lever.

77. "Common hatred unites the most heterogeneous elements. To share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship, and thus sap his powers of resistance."

- Eric Hoffer.

78. "It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."

- W. Edwards Deming.

79. "Resistance to change is always the biggest obstacle."

- Chris Paine.

80. "I focus on having a feminine body, a dancer’s body. I do resistance and dance and cardio. I like hiking, swimming, being active. It clears your mind and it’s a good way to decompress."

- Ashley Greene.

81. "Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance."

- Steven Pressfield.

82. "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive."

- Thomas Jefferson.

83. "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."

- Mother Theresa.

84. "There are men who struggle for a day and they are good."

- Bertolt Brecht.

85. "Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance."

- Agnes Repplier.

86. "Bodies, projected in our air, suffer no resistance but from the air."

- Sir Issac Newton.

87. "To be gritty is to resist complacency."

- Angela Duckworth.

88. "Change is inevitable—except from a vending machine."

- Robert C Gallagher.

This section has famous civil rights quotes, social justice quotes, famous political quotes and more.

89. "The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering."

- Hubert Selby Jr.

90. "The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. This image shows a tension, a desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear."

- Henri Nouwen.

91. "Resisting is worth doing."

- Veronica Roth, 'The Transfer'.

92. "Every moment of resistance to temptation is a victory."

- Frederick William Faber.

93. "There is no true peace without fairness, truth, justice, and solidarity."

- St. Pope John Paul II.

94. "We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor."

-  Robert Lowell.

95. "Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act."

Stephen King.

96. "An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted."

- Victor Hugo.

97. "Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were never good."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald.

98. "If you want to make enemies, try to change something."

- Woodrow Wilson.

99. "Imagination is the weapon to fight off an impossibility."

- Bongha Lee.

100. "Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be."

- Christopher Hitchens.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for resistance quotes, then why not take a look at civil rights quotes, or Nat Turner quotes.