Civil Disobedience

Every American should read this book. This should be read in every public school. Write these words on walls, monuments, and make them into posters and billboards.

Purchase a couple of copies...One for yourself and pass out the rest...

Henry David Thoreau 'On Civil Disobedience'

http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Disobedience-Other-Essays-Thoreau/dp/1607961032/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255622443&sr=8-2-spell
Selected Quotes:

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies."

"In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones" "Others- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God."

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

"In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country 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 that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."

"I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, neat at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless."

"O for a man who is a man, and, and my neighbor says. has a bone is his back which you cannot pass your hand through!"

"Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves-the union between themselves and the State"

"Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles."

"For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State."

"I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion."