THE SNYDER PRINCIPLES

On fasting:

"There's a reason why terrorists take hostages; it's because they're trying to capture people's attention . . . In our situation, the great difference {is} our commitment to nonviolence, both as a political technique and as a life style. We too from time to time have to cause people to pay attention to something, some particular injustice . . . and fasting is a very powerful way of doing that because it becomes a life-and-death situation.

"The dilemma is there are not an insignificant number of situations that demand a life-and-death response. I find myself in very uncomfortable situations {where} I know that a fast is an appropriate thing to do, but each time it's done, it reduces the power of that act . . . We're getting to the point where we just can't keep fasting every year."

On family:

"All human beings are members of one family . . . and that dictates that we shouldn't allow people to freeze and starve. I believe that a healthy family takes into account more than just a small group of people who share blood . . . We're essentially tribal creatures anyway."

On religion:

"For me, it's a God that transcends any one religion. I call myself a Christian, but it's the same God that's present in Buddhism or Hinduism or all of the faiths . . . I don't look to the institutional church as offering a great deal of hope."

On media attention:

"It's something you deal with. Recently the coverage has been very nice. It hasn't always been that way. I don't find it fun at all to have people say things about me that are hurtful, or that are intended to diminish me as a person, or that call into question my seriousness or my motivations."

On his confrontational approach:

"We do what we do because we have to. Everybody says, well, why don't you be more polite and patient? And the answer is, because we were polite and patient and nobody paid attention. Our experience has been that institutions and centers of power, whether it's The Washington Post or the federal government or the church or whoever, they are profoundly committed to the status quo, and any alteration of the status quo is going to come at a price."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.