A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.

Henry David Thoreau

Quote Topics

Government Agent Another Break Counter Friction Injustice Law Life Machine Requires Say Stop Then Your

Quote Author

Henry David Thoreau
American - Author
July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862

f the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth - certainly the machine will wear out... but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Henry David Thoreau

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Henry David Thoreau

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

Henry David Thoreau

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth

Henry David Thoreau

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Henry David Thoreau

If however the law is so promulgated that it of necessity makes you an agent of injustices against another, then I say to you ... break the law.

Henry David Thoreau

...the statement, "The purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign," is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.

Frederic Bastiat

Never stand idly while people commit what you know to be an injustice! Injustice only leads to more injustice!

Robert Kiyosaki

It's time to realize that one cannot combat one injustice by invoking and using another injustice

Sergey Lavrov

I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the leastact of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.

Henry David Thoreau

If we won't fight injustice wherever we see it, then we are not safe from suffering injustice ourselves.

Peter Hitchens

It is manifest that the only security against the tyranny of the government lies in forcible resistance to the execution of the injustice; because the injustice will certainly be executed, unless it be forcibly resisted.

Lysander Spooner

[ To break the law] would still be an imperative. I guess we do it for both reasons. You try to be a Christian, you try to come from that tradition of the Jewish prophets and then Christ and everything since. That becomes your handbook. "Witness" is the key word. You witness against the injustice, against the atrocity, against the heavy-handedness, and all the rest. We try to make a statement to other people, and we try to say it's your responsibility, too.

Philip Berrigan

Law is justice. In this proposition a simple and enduring government can be conceived. And I defy anyone to say how even the thought of revolution, of insurrection, of the slightest uprising could arise against a government whose organized force was confined only to suppressing injustice.

Frederic Bastiat

To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.