Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Liberty
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The majority of the men of the North, and of the South and East and West, are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not sendmen to Congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty,... it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them.
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Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
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As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
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If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.
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The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
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All good things are wild and free.
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When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?
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Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
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America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. Now that the republic--the res- publica--has been settled, it is time to look after the res- privata,--the private state,--to see, as the Roman Senate charged its consuls, "ne quid res-PRIVATA detrimenti caperet," that the private state receive no detriment.
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No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.
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While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.
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Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause - nor any charter of immunities and rights.
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The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
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Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.
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That government is best which governs least.
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When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.
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Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
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Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
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That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
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We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.
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If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
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Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
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How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
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I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.
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If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
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We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.
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Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
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