When that devil's bullet lodged itself inside the body of Martin Luther King, he had already begun an astonishing mobilization of ...poor, Black, white, latino Americans who had nothing to lose. They would challenge our government to eliminate exploitative, merciless, and war-mongering policies, nationwide, or else "tie up the country" through "means of civil disobedience." Dr. King intended to organize those legions into "coercive direct actions" that would make of Babylon a dysfunctional behemoth begging for relief. Is it any wonder he was killed?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is ... alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-k...nown in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is my contention that civil disobedients are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite... in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient's taking the law... into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to have them order me out to help ...put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico;Msee if I would go"; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangere...d, 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with,--for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment t...hat I quarrel,--and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly ...possible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be... accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No civilization ... would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change.... Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »