A Quote by Oscar Wilde
Disobedience is man's original virtue.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.
The state says: "Well, in order for it to be legitimate civil disobedience, you have to follow these rules." They put us in "free-speech zones"; they say you can only do it at this time, and in this way, and you can't interrupt the functioning of the government. They limit the impact that civil disobedience can achieve. We have to remember that civil disobedience must be disobedience if it's to be effective.
When you know how to use it, disobedience can be a virtue.
When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled...It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase.
All good things were formerly bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue.
An Ambassadore is a man of virtue sent to lie abroad for his country, a news writer is a man of no virtue who lies at home for himself.
Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.
The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original; the only original author being God.
The determined scholar and the man of virtue will not seek to live at the expense of injuring their virtue. They will even sacrifice their lives to preserve their virtue complete.
I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts.
Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.
Civil disobedience presupposes willing obedience of our self-imposed rules, and without it civil disobedience would be a cruel joke.
Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.
Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play.
The virtue of the good man is necessarily the same as the virtue of the citizen of the perfect state.
Related Authors
Alexander Pope Quotes
English
Poet
Emily Dickinson Quotes
American
Poet
George Herbert Quotes
British
Poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes
American
Poet
Homer Quotes
Greek
Poet
Horace Quotes
Roman
Poet
John Milton Quotes
English
Poet
Khalil Gibran Quotes
Lebanese
Poet
Lord Byron Quotes
British
Poet
Maya Angelou Quotes
American
Poet
Ovid Quotes
Roman
Poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes
English
Poet
T. S. Eliot Quotes
American
Poet
Walt Whitman Quotes
American
Poet
William Butler Yeats Quotes
Irish
Poet