Henry David Thoreau

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

As for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?

I heartily accept the motto, — 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — 'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

I do not wish to be regarded as a member of any society which I have not joined.

The only excuse for a man's doing anything that he doesn't like is that he has to do it.

Sometimes I almost think that I am a pagan, and that I would rather worship the sun than any other god.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 'What's the news?' as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give him the news as if they were waiting for his waking to tell him. I should think by the way some men talk that they were still in the womb, and had never been born.

Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.

If I am not I, who will be?

We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and firing of the idea of the beautiful into us.

The gentleman is a man of leisure who knows how to use it.