Civil Disobedience Quotes - Page 2

• No one will give you change. You have to work for it. You have to earn it not by screaming, but by working hard, by believing in yourself, by proving yourself. There are windows, but if you are radical, no one will talk to you. And that window will shut.

  Haifaa al-Mansour

  Leadership, Wisdom, Believe

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• The problem in this world is not civil disobedience...th e problem in this world is civil obedience.

  Howard Zinn

  World, Problem, Obedience

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• I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it.

  Martin Sheen

  Government, Promise, Honest

  Interview with David Kupfer, progressive.org. July 1, 2003.

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• Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Law, Unjust, Unjust Laws

  Henry David Thoreau (2004). “Walden and Other Writings”, p.96, Bantam Classics

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• Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Machines, Life Is, Friction

  Henry David Thoreau (1942). “Civil Disobedience”, p.9, Hayes Barton Press

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• I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peace, Block, Order

  Letter from Birmingham Jail, Alabama, 16 Apr. 1963, in Atlantic Monthly Aug. 1963, p. 81

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• If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Giving Up, War, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.293, Simon and Schuster

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• Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  Demand, Way, Authority

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• Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.

  Arundhati Roy

  Powerful, War, Fighting

  Arundhati Roy (2004). “Public Power in the Age of Empire”, p.39, Seven Stories Press

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• There's a reason survivors choose not to go to the police, and that's because they're treated as the criminals. The rapists are innocent until proven guilty, but survivors are guilty until proven innocent - at least in the eyes of the police.

  Emma Sulkowicz

  Eye, Class, Justice

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• Before civil disobedience can be practised on a vast scale, people must learn the art of civil or voluntary obedience.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Art, People, Obedience

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1986). “The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi: Non-Violent Resistance and Social Transformation”, Clarendon Press

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• If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Government, Finals, Made

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• Disobedience that is wholly civil should never provoke retaliation.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Should, Retaliation, Provoking

  Mahatma Gandhi (1974). “Collected Works”

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• A downtrodden class... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.

  H. G. Wells

  Class, Alliances, Able

  H. G. Wells, Walter Warren Wagar (2004). “The Outline of History: The Roman Empire to the Great War”, p.351, Barnes & Noble Publishing

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• There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.

  Hannah Arendt

  Eye, Ill Will, Hands

  Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.85, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI.

  Martin Sheen

  Justice, Firsts, Social

  Interview with David Kupfer, progressive.org. July 1, 2003.

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• Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Majority, Neighbor

  Civil Disobedience (1849) See Coolidge 2; Douglass 7; Andrew Jackson 7; John Knox 1; Wendell Phillips 3

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• A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the
  great sense, and men, serve the state with their conscience also,
  and so necessarily resist it for the most part, and they are
  commonly treated as enemies by it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Hero, Men, Enemy

  Henry David Thoreau, Nancy L. Rosenblum (1996). “Thoreau: Political Writings”, p.3, Cambridge University Press

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• That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Kind, Anarchist

  Civil Disobedience (1849) See Ralph Waldo Emerson 29; O'Sullivan 1; Shipley 1

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• I believe strongly that Occupy Wall Street had such limits because the local authorities were able to enforce, basically in our imaginations, an image of what proper civil disobedience is - one that is simply ineffective.

  Edward Snowden

  Wall, Believe, Imagination

  Source: www.thenation.com

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• I view the United States, today, much like East Berlin. And I'm off the grid. I've tried for 20 years to warn the country about the Democrats and Republicans, and nobody's listening.

  Jesse Ventura

  Country, Party, Technology

  "Jesse Ventura hiding from drones" by Tal Kopan, www.politico.com. February 5, 2014.

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• If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth

  Henry David Thoreau

  Government, Let It Go, Machines

  Civil Disobedience (1849) See Savio 1

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• There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Littles, Action

  Henry David Thoreau (1942). “Civil Disobedience”, p.6, Hayes Barton Press

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• Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Voting, Doing Nothing, Voting Day

  Henry David Thoreau (1942). “Civil Disobedience”, p.6, Hayes Barton Press

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• I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Government, Transcendentalism, Anarchist

  Civil Disobedience (1849) See Ralph Waldo Emerson 29; O'Sullivan 1; Shipley 1

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