« In most books, the I, or first person, is
omitted ; in this it wil be retained ; that, in respect to egotism,
is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all,
always the first person that is speaking. »
« Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own
private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or
rather indicates, his fate. »
« The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What
is called resignation is confirmed desperation. »
« But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do
desperate things. »
« Practically, the old have no very important advice to
give the young, their own experience has
been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private
reasons, as they must believe ; and it may be that they have some faith
left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they
were. »
« Nature and human life are as various as our several
constitutions. »
« We should live in all the ages of the world in an
hour ; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry,
Mythology ! I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and
informing as this would be.
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in
my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good
behavior. »
« Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our
strength. »
« All change is a miracle to contemplate ; but it
is a miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, « To know
that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is
true knowledge. » When one man has reduced a fact of imagination to be a
fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish
their lives on that basis. »
« It would be some advantage to live a primitive and
frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn
what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to
obtain them ; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to
see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored,
that is, what are the grossest groceries. »
« The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,
accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter,
Clothing, and Fuel ; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to
entertain the true problems of life with
freedom and a prospect of success. »
« Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of
Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting
close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther
off, were observed, to his gre at
surprise, « to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a
roasting. »
« Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these
savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man ? According to
Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal
combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. »
« Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then
unnecessary ; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently
cooked by its rays ; while Food generally is more various, and more easily
obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. »
« The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian
and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none
so rich in inward. »
« None can be an impartial or wise observer of human
life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary
poverty. »
« There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but no
philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable
to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to
found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a
life of simplicity, independance, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some
of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success
of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly,
not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their
fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of
men. »
« yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety,
commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to
have a sound conscience. »
« Even in our democratic New England towns the
accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage
alone, obtain from the possessor almost universal respect. »
« If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be
made to fit ? »
« Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but
follows religiously the new. »
« It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our
days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if
the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so
long. »
« I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of
hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter
because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because
he cannot afford to own it ; nor can he, in the long run, any better to
afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax the poor civilized
man secures an adobe which is a palace compared with the savage’s. »
« we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage
comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. »
« While civilization has been improving our houses, it
has not eqaully improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created
palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. »
« Shall we always study to obtain more of these things,
and not sometimes to be content with less ? Shall the respectable citizen
thus gravely teach by precept and example, the necessity of the young man’s
providing a certain number of superfluous glowshoves, and umbrellas, and empty
guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies ? Why should not our
furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s ? »
« I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to
myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an
ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an
excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way. »
« men have become the tools of their tools. »
« We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved
method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for
the nest a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s
struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is
merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be
forgotten. »
« The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser
savage. »
« In those days, when my hands were much employed, I
read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my
holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the
same purpose as the Iliad. »
« I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in
so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the
community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man ; it
is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is the division
of labor to end ? and what objects does it finally serve ? »
« If I wished a boy to know something about the arts
and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is
merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is
professed and practiced but the art of life. »
« This spending of the best part og one’s life earning
money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part
of it, reminds meof the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first,
in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. »
« When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or
artistic, but luwurious and idle work ; with their assistance, it is
inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other
words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works for the
animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without
him. »
« One piece of good sense would be more memorable than
a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. »
« Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt
himself to all climates and circumstances. »
« I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is
travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from
long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn ; great trunk,
little trunk, bandbox and bundle. »
« When a man dies he kicks the dust. »
« I desire that there may be as many different persons
in the world as possible ; but I would have each one be very careful to
find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his
neighbor’s instead. »
« There is no odor so bad as that which arises from
goodness tainted. »
« Philantropy is almost the only virtue which is
sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated ; and it
is our selfishness which overrates it. »
« As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It
makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county
jail. »
« Olympus is but the outside of the earth every
where. »
« Such was not my adobe, for i found myself suddenly
neighbor to the birds ; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged
myself near them. »
« There was pasture enough for imagination. »
« The morning, which is the most memorable season of
the day, is the awakening hour. »
« All memorable events, I should say, transpire in
morning time and in a morning atmosphere. »
« To be awake is to be alive. »
« I went to the woods because I wanted to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not
learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived. »
« To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is
gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. »
« In eternity there is indeed something true and
sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. »
« The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and
noble a design but some of his posterity at least could acoomplish it. »
« Be it life or death, we crave only reality. »
« Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at
it ; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it
is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink
deeper ; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. »
« My residence was more favorable, not only to thought,
but to serious reading, than a university. »
« The heroic books, even if printed in the character of
our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times ;
and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and
generosity we have. »
« Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics
would at length make way for modern and practical studies ; but the
adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may
be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the
noblest recorded thoughts of man ? »
« To read well, that is, to read trues books in a true
spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any
exercise which the customs of the day esteem. »
« What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly
found to be rhetoric in the study. »
« No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him
on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of
relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than
any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. »
« Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the
fit inheritance of generations and nations. »
« By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at
last. »
« The best books are not read even by those who are
called good readers. »
« How many a man has dated a new era in his life from
the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our
miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may
find somewhere uttered. »
« Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn
liberality. »
« It is time that villages were universities, and their
elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure – if they are
indeed so well off – to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall
the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever ? »
« If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river,
go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of
ignorance which surrounds us. »
« I confess, that practically speaking, when I have
learned a man’s real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better
or worse in this state of existence. »
« I believe that men are generally still a little
afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and
candles have been introduced. »
« Why should I feel lonely ? is not our planet in
the Milky Way ? »
« I love to be alone. I never found the companion that
was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we
go abroad among men that when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or
working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by
the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really
diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as
solitary as a dervis in the desert. »
« Morning air ! If men will not drink of this at
the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sel lit
in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket
to morning time in this world. »
« I had three chairs in my house ; one for
solitude, two for friendship, three for society. »
« One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small
a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when
we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your
thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make
their port. »
« Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad
and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between
them. »
« You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you
give. »
« Wiser men were demigods to him. »
« yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen
before, and I did not know whether he
was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect
him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. »
« It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable
experience, to bel ost in the woods any time. »
« Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we
have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are
and the infinite extent of our relations. »
« I am convinced, that if all men were to live as
simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. »
« The virtues of a superior man are like the
wind ; the virtues of a common man are like the grass ; the grass,
when the wind passes over it, bends. »
« Who knows in how many unremembered nations’
literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain ? »
« These are the lips of the lake on which no beard
grows. »
« A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and
epxressive feature. It is earth’s eye ; looking into which the beholder
measures the depth of his own nature. »
« I observed that the pond was remarkably smooth, so
that is was difficult to distinguish its surface ; though it no longer
reflected the bright tints of October, but the sombre November colors of the
surrounding hills. »
« Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers
are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor – poor
farmers. »
« Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates
her. »
« We should come home from far, from adventures, and
perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character. »
« Thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man
passes through the hunter stage of development. »
« Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as
well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an
unusually complete experience. »
« The gross feeder is a man in the larva state ;
and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or
imagination, whose cast abdomens betray them. »
« I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of
the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as
surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in
contact with the more civilzed. »
« I believe that water is the only drink for a wise
man ; wine is not so noble a liquor ; and think of dashing the hopes
of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or an evening with a dish of
tea ! »
« Our whole life is startingly moral. There is never an
instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that
never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the
insisting on this which thrills us. »
« We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in
proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile ans sensual, and
perhaps cannot be wholly expelled ; like the worms which, even in life and
health, occupy our bodies. »
« Chastity is the flowering of man ; and what are
called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which
succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. »
« All sensuality is one, though it takes many
forms ; all purity is one. »
« If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What
is chastity ? How shall a man know if he is chaste ? He shall not
know it. We have heard of this virtue , but we know not what it is. »
« Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be
overcome. »
« Every man is the builder of a temple, called his
body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off
by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our
material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to
refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. »
« Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. »
« Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a
world ? »
« It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and
free though secret in the wods, and still sustain themselves in the
neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. »
« it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed
by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. »
« It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood
even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal
than that of gold. »
« He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the
world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He
wore a great coat in mid-summer, being affected with the trembling delirium,
and his face was the color of carmine. »
« There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable
here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no
worthy foundation. »
« Nature puts no question and answers non which we
mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. »
« Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up
their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air
of heaven. »
« This is a remarkable depth for so small an
area ; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all
ponds were shallow ? Would it not react on the minds of men ? I am
thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe
in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. »
« What I have observed of the pond is no less true in
ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only
guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines
through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily
behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect
will be the height or depth of his character. »
« It is true, we are such poor navigators that our
thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are
conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public
ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit
for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. »
« In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous
and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years
of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its
literature seem puny and trivial ; and I doubt if that philosophy is not
to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity
from our conceptions. »
« The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the
winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the
summer. »
« No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly
in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned
this law, and are pregnant with it. »
« The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history,
stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and
antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede
flowers and fruit, - not a fossil earth, but a living earth ; compared
with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely
parasitic. »
« Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an
inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this
king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant ; but with the gentleness
of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer. »
« I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847. »
« The universe is wider than our views of it. »
« Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds
within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. »
« If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform
to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers,
be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dahs her head against a
stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself.
Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. »
« I left the woods for as good reason as I went there.
Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare
any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall
into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. »
« I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to
go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the
moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment ; that if
one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live
the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible
boundary ; new, unversal, and more liberal llaws will begin to establish
themselves around and within him ; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted
in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the licence of a
higher order of being. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the
universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor
poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not bel ost ; that is where they should be. Now put the
foundations under them. »
« The purity men love is like the mists which envelop
the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. »
« If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music
which he hears, however measured or far away. »
«However mean your life is, meet it and live it ; do
not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks
poorest when you are richest. »
« Love your life, poor as it is. »
« Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do
not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn
the old ; return to them. Things do not change ; we change. Sell your
clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want
society. »
« It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. »
« Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money
is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. »
« Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me
truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and
obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not ; and I went away
hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I
thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. »
« The government of the world I live in was not framed,
like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise
this year higher than man has ever know nit, and flood the parched
uplands ; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our
muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. »
« The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun
is but a morning star. »
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
« I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a
better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would
command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. »
« I think that we should be men first, and subjects
afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, sor much as
for the right. The only obligation which I have the right to assume, is to do
at any time what I think right. »
« Law never made men a whit more just. »
« The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men
mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. »
« He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men
appears to them useless and selfish ; but he who gives himself partially
to the mis pronounced a benefactor and philantropist. »
« All men recognize the right of revolution. »
« but improvement is slow, because the few are not
materially wiser or better than the many. »
« There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to
slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to
them ; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit
down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do,
and do nothing. »
« Even voting for the right is doing nothing for
it. »
« But it is the fault of the government itself that the
remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to
anticipate and provide for reform ? Why does it not cherish its wise
minority ? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt ? Why does it
not encourage its citizen to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do
better than it would have them ? Why does it always crucify Christ, and
excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin
rebels ? »
« So is all change for the better, like birth and
death, which convulse the body. »
« Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the
true place for a just man is also a prison. »
« Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience
is wounded ? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow
out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing
now. »
« If there were one who lived wholly without the use of
money, the State itself would hesitate to demand it of him. But the rich man, -
not to make any invidious comparison, - is always sold to the institution which
makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue ; for
money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him ; and
it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. »
« It will not be wortht he while to accumulate property ;
that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but
a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon
yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. A
man maygrow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject
of the Turkish government. Confucius said : « If a state is governed
by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame ; if
a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the
subjects of shame. »
« It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty
of disobedience to the State, than it would to obey. »
« I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into
a jail once on this account, for one night. »
« I could not help being struck with the foolishness of
that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones
and bones, to be locked up. »
« As they could not reach me, they had resolved to
punish my body. »
« I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was
timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its
friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied
it.
Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense,
intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with
superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to
be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the
strongest. What force has a multitude ? They only can force me who obey a
higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. »
« I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to
withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. »
« In fact, I quietly declare war with the State, after
my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I
can, as is usual in such cases. »
« I do not wish to quarrel with any man or
nation. »
« If a man is thought-free, fancy-free,
imagination-free, that which is not never
for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot
fatally interrupt him.
I know that most men think differently from myself ;
but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or
kindred subjects, content me as little as any. »
« They speak of moving society, but have no
resting-place without it. »
« No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in
America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators,
politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand ; but the speaker has not
yet opened his mouth to speak, who is capable of settling the much-vexed
questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth
which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. »
« The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy,
from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for
the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the
individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the
last improvement possible in government ? »
« There will never be a really free and enlightened
State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and
independant power. »
« A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered
it to to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more
perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere
seen. »
Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau
