Best 44 quotes in «civil disobedience quotes» category

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

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

... true civil disobedience ... compels the state to resort to power.

Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights.

Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.

A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of partial victory by which new efforts are powered.

Another site of Leftist struggle [other than Detroit] that has parallels to New Orleans: Palestine. From the central role of displacement to the ways in which culture and community serve as tools of resistance, there are illuminating comparisons to be made between these two otherwise very different places. In the New Orleans Black community, death is commemorated as a public ritual (it's often an occasion for a street party), and the deceased are often also memorialized on t-shirts featuring their photos embellished with designs that celebrate their lives. Worn by most of the deceased's friends and family, these t-shirts remind me of the martyr posters in Palestine, which also feature a photo and design to memorialize the person who has passed on. In Palestine, the poster's subjects are anyone who has been killed by the occupation, whether a sick child who died at a checkpoint or an armed fighter killed in combat. In New Orleans, anyone with family and friends can be memorialized on a t-shift. But a sad truth of life in poor communities is that too many of those celebrate on t-shirts lost their lives to violence. For both New Orleans and Palestine, outsiders often think that people have become so accustomed to death by violence that it has become trivialized by t-shirts and posters. While it's true that these traditions wouldn't manifest in these particular ways if either population had more opportunities for long lives and death from natural causes, it's also far from trivial to find ways to celebrate a life. Outsiders tend to demonize those killed--especially the young men--in both cultures as thugs, killers, or terrorists whose lives shouldn't be memorialized in this way, or at all. But the people carrying on these traditions emphasize that every person is a son or daughter of someone, and every death should be mourned, every life celebrated.

But we need to search for and find, what we need to own and perfect into a magnificent, shining thing, is a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governments, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of forcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. In the present circumstances, I'd say the only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it... In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did.

Disobedience to rigid laws is a revolutionary act.

Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one’s beloved extended community.

DESEGREGATE THE BUSES WITH THIS 7 POINT PROGRAM: 1. Pray for guidance. 2. Be courteous and friendly. 3. Be neat and clean. 4. Avoid loud talk. 5. Do not argue. 6. Report incidents immediately. 7. Overcome evil with good. Sponsored by Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance Rev. A. L. Davis, Pres. Rev. J. E. Poindexter, Secretary

If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know how much truth is stronger than errors, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.

Ethnicity and tribe began, by definition, where sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler 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; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season.

I never read Civil Disobedience. They did assign it.

It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck.

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

The basis of Gandhi's nonviolence is to appeal to the good in others and evoke sympathy to one's cause through self-suffering.

No doubt you’ve heard the phrase 'ignorance of the law is no excuse’, and are probably familiar with the statist meaning of that phrase: Being ignorant of a law is no excuse for breaking it. However 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' also has a less-well-known libertarian meaning: This is an ignorant law and there’s no excuse for it!

Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturers and agriculture. Nuestros legisladores no han aprendido todavía el valor comparativo del libre cambio y la libertad, la unión y la rectitud hacia la nación. No tienen genio ni talento para hacerse preguntas humildes sobre impuestos y finanzas, comercio, manufactura y agricultura.

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.

So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have done in the past? The best solution anyone has come up with is to say that violent revolutions can be avoided (and therefore, violent mobs legitimately suppressed) if 'the people' are understood to have the right to challenge the laws through nonviolent civil disobedience.

The question deserves to be asked: Is hating one's nation really such a bad thing? Or perhaps more importantly, after the crimes our government has committed, what moral self-respecting person can truly love this nation?

The leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using Black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing Black culture to 'vindicate' Black people.

Un perro puede morderte, ¡pero tú no debes morder al perro! Todos y cada uno de tus movimientos deben ser pacíficos; de otro modo pierdes tu superioridad ética. La DESOBEDIENCIA CIVIL NO VIOLENTA es genial; NO HAY PODER QUE LA PUEDA VENCER: ÚSALA CUANDO SEA NECESARIO.

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

We live in a nation where education and free thought are tantamount to treason, and I have to ask, under these circumstances, is treason such a bad thing?

We need in every bay and community a group of angelic troublemakers.

Why do some people feel offended by the word shit, but not by the word poop? Because some little old lady at the FCC decided that good citizens don't use the word shit, and suddenly using a word like shit or fuck becomes an act of civil disobedience. Suddenly a little four-letter word has the power to shock.

Accepting yourself as you are is an act of civil disobedience.

A defiant deed has greater value than unnumerable thousands of words.

Civil disobedience is an act of love.

Civil disobedience can only lead to strength and purity.

Civil disobedience does not admit of any violence or countenancing of violence directly or indirectly.

Civil disobedience can never be in general terms, such as for independence.

Civil disobedience is the inherent right of a citizen.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.

Disobedience to be civil has to be open and nonviolent.

No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime.

Satyagraha does not begin and end with civil disobedience.