Civil disobedience Quotes
A curated collection of the best quotes about Civil disobedience.
Top Quotes
“Direct action”
“Nonviolent resistance”
“Conscientious objector”
“An unjust law is no law at all.”
“We must obey God rather than men.”
“I died to the law so that I might live for God.”
“Civil Disobedience, the famous essay by Henry David Thoreau”
“'That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed.'”
“Men of the most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.”
“Wikipedia: Civil disobedience”
“Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.”
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made.”
“How does the fact that ten men may choose to join together for their common protection, impose upon the eleventh man any obligation to go along with them?”
“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison […] the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.”
“The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.”
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”
“I hold the opinion firmly that Civil Disobedience is the purest type of constitutional agitation. Of course, it becomes degrading and despicable if its civil, i.e. non-violent character is a mere camouflage.”
“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."”
“Thoreau's disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won't live in your world. I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it.”