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Tuesday, May 26, 2020

10 Best Quotes from “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau

Although the essay was written 168 years ago, the subject of Civil Disobedience is more relevant than ever.

As people debate the scope of government power in regards to Covid-19 lockdowns, some are openly defying the law.

Henry David Thoreau believed that it was not only proper but necessary to disobey bad laws.

Civil Disobedience, or Resisting Civil Government as it was originally titled, was published in 1849. Thoreau was 32 years old, living in Massachusetts. At this point, Thoreau had already spent his time at Walden Pond.

Thoreau had also spent a night in jail years earlier after refusing to pay a poll tax, which he discusses in Civil Disobedience. He was actually annoyed when an anonymous person paid his bail because Thoreau saw his time in jail as a worthy sacrifice to protest the injustice of extortion AKA taxes.

Here are the ten best quotes from his 25-page essay.
1.

“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. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,-‘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.”

This is how Thoreau begins the essay. The point is that government is only required when things need to be forced, and someday, we will live in a world where everything worth being done at all is done voluntarily.
2.

“The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted, before the people can act through it.”

Sometimes people need to get together to make things happen. A government is one way to do that, if you need to build a road, or keep people safe. But sometimes governments also murder millions of people, keep entire segments of the population in slavery, and bring the earth to the brink of nuclear holocaust.

But they do build the roads…

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well things have changed a lot since his isolation and idealist Prose on Walden. Most of American History is made up by the privileged lofty and poetic notions that give names to such as the Sunshine Patriot and Minute man most of which poor indentured immigrants not different and no less aspiring than we have now.