Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Remarkable Civil Disobedience quotations
A defiant deed has greater value than unnumerable thousands of words.
I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier.
In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you...because no one has the right to take the life of another human being.
One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.
Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.
The problem in this world is not civil disobedience...th e problem in this world is civil obedience.
No one understands that the First Amendment is only important if you are going to offend somebody. If you're not going to offend somebody, you don't need protection of the First Amendment.
Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.
I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.
There is no justice in following unjust laws.
It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the same time the beginning of his freedom and the development of his reason.
A downtrodden class... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.
Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.
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?
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest.
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
Government is best which governs least
Marches work, rallies work, civil disobedience works, direct action works, voting works, writing letters works, speaking to churches and schools works, rioting works.
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.
. . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience'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.
If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.
It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.
I believe that Gandhi was correct. Non-violent civil disobedience is the only way to bring about change that allows people to enjoy the change and not get killed in the process.
An unjust law is itself a species of violence.
Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.
You can't be neutral on a moving train.
Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.
I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
No one will give you change. You have to work for it. You have to earn it not by screaming, but by working hard, by believing in yourself, by proving yourself. There are windows, but if you are radical, no one will talk to you. And that window will shut.
Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.
Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.
We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong.
.. There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them.
It takes courage to speak up against complacency and injustice while others remain silent. But that's what leadership is.
The privilege of resisting or disobeying a particular law or order accrues only to him who gives willing and unswerving obedience to the laws laid down for him.