Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong.

We traced this line to Gandhi's own journalism, specifically his Young India writings of August 1920, where he argued at length that nonviolence is the weapon of the strong while cowardice and hypocrisy are the recourse of the weak. Our review of published anthologies confirms the exact seven-word wording in circulation: Howard Zinn's The Power of Nonviolence (2002) and Roger Gottlieb's Liberating Faith (2003) both reproduce "Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong. With the weak it might easily be hypocrisy" as Gandhi's, and G. Ramachandran and T.K. Mahadevan's Gandhi: His Relevance for Our Times likewise carries the phrase within firsthand recollection of him. The formulation matches Gandhi's characteristic contrast between ahimsa-as-courage and cowardice throughout The Collected Works, so this is not a floating aphorism but language anchored to a datable source. We found no credible competing author or any documented earlier use, so there is no basis for treating it as disputed or misattributed. The only genuine caveat is textual: some editions render it "Non-violence is the weapon of the strong," a trivial variant that does not alter meaning or authorship. On the strength of the Young India provenance and multiple published books carrying the exact wording, this quote is verified.