From: Jonathan Huang <jonhuang@juno.com>
Reply-To: ld-l@world.std.com
To: ld-l@world.std.com
Subject: Civil disobedience evidence
Some freebies. Most are only assertions, but are suitable for a
start-quote. A number stray into the right to rebel, which is close but
not quite the same thing. (Would that work as a case, perchance? If men
have an inalienable right to rebel, surely they can be disobedient as
well.) I apologize for the length.
. ___ / ___
. / \|/ \ * Mark of the PBNA *
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.\ / ~Jon of Huang~
. \___/\___/ Democratic Fundraiser at Large
I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.
New York Mayor David Dinkins
Commenting on accusations that he failed to pay his taxes
Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then
they are of all men the least inclined to do so.
Aristotle
Politics
Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.
Martin Buber
Paths in Eutopia, 1950
The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.
William F. Buckley, Jr.,
Windfall: The End of the Affair
Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-- in nothing,
great or small, large or petty-- never give in except to convictions of
honor and good sense.
Sir Winston Churchill, 1941
Address at Harrow School
An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break
their fetters.
Henry Clay, 1818
Speech in the House of Representatives
Assassinate me you may; intimidate me you cannot.
John Philpot Curran
Defense of Rebels, 1798
When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's
constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters
into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at
all.
Justice William O. Douglas
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
Albert Einstein
quoted in Saturday Review obituary, 1955
No real social change has ever been brought about without a
revolution....Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Emma Goldman
Anarchism, 1917
The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by
their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves
of oppression, if they are strong enough, whether by withdrawal from it,
or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.
Ulysses S. Grant
Personal Memoirs, 1885
In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
Learned Hand, 1958
Lecture at Harvard
...whenever any form of government becomes destructive...it is the right
of the people to alter or abolish it...
Thomas Jefferson
Declaration of Independence, 1776
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, 1962
If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to
live.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for
the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the
rights and the most indispensible of duties.
Marquis de Lafayette, 1790
Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the
United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United
States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts-- not to
overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the
Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.
Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can
exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary
right to dismember or overthrow it.
Abraham Lincoln, 1861
Important principles may and must be inflexible.
Abraham Lincoln, 1865
Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of
the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put
themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved
from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God
hath provided for all men against force and violence.
John Locke
Two Treatises of Government, 1698
Nobody ever defended anything successfully-- there is only attack and
attack and attack some more.
George S. Patton, Jr.
Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act.
Talmud
Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some
perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent
amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely
necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no
advance towards civilisation.
Oscar Wilde
The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
Woodrow Wilson
Just because something is a law doesn't make it right.
Anonymous letter
in American Survival Guide, 1992
No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the
perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.
Joseph Addison
Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Political
Fragments, 1794
Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a
crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
Freda Adler
Sisters in Crime, 1975
There is a higher law than the law of government. That's the law of
conscience.
Stokely Carmichael, 1966
One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who
willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the
conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing
the highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963
Letter from Birmingham Jail
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.
Abraham Lincoln
It is legal because I wish it.
Louis XIV
Laws are only words words written on paper, words that change on society's
whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers,
judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be
obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all
laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a
fool.
John J. Miller
And Hope to Die
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public
welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
Montesquieu
Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him
into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze
back into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Petty laws breed great crimes.
Ouida
No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from
private persons to government.
Isabel Paterson
The God of the Machine, 1943
Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and
this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 1770
Hello? Is anyone still reading? The last one is useless:
The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in
463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent
federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.
Atlanta Journal
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