Dave Dellinger

‘Before reading this book, I knew and greatly admired Dave Dellinger. Or so I thought. After reading his remarkable story, my admiration changed to something more like awe. There can be few people in the world who have crafted their lives into something truly inspiring. This autobiography introduces us to one of them, with the simplicity and integrity that characterizes everything Dave has done.’ –Noam Chomsky, praising Dellinger’s autobiography, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a…

Introducing ‘Declaration of War’ in his 1970 book Revolutionary Nonviolence, Dave Dellinger commented that two years in a maximum security prison during the Second World War had changed his mind about violence against property (while leaving him still firmly opposed to violence against people).

Dellinger wrote: ‘In a society which exalts property rights above human rights, it is sometimes necessary to damage or destroy property, both because property has no intrinsic value…

The following anti-capitalist statement of revolutionary nonviolence was published as an editorial in the first issue of Direct Action, which US pacifist Dave Dellinger helped to launch in September 1945, just weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When it was reprinted in his collection of essays, Revolutionary Nonviolence (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), Dellinger described it as ‘one of the clearest and most concise expressions’ in the book of his beliefs and commitments.

The atom…