Civil Disobedience

«According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?” Emerson was “out there” because he believed it was shortsighted to protest an isolated evil; society required an entire rebirth of spirituality».

All people who make society a real highway robbery

«He knew that grandees, viziers, gentlemen of the robe, financiers, doctors, priests, philosophers, and all people who make society a real highway robbery, would never forgive him for having seen through them and showed them as they were».

 

(Rousseau, Dialogues).

You will soon learn...

(Nazi doctor) – You will soon learn that’s better to keep your mouth shut and to do as you’re told.

(Prisoner) – Thanks, I have no wish to become a Nazi.

 

From: Night Train to Munich (1940)

Stato e individuo

«Se lo Stato non si modella sull’immagine dell'individuo, come potrà l’individuo modellarsi sull’immagine dello Stato?»

The masters of mankind

«But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas in the more ancient method of expense they must have shared with at least a thousand people. With the judges that were to determine the preference this difference was perfectly decisive; and thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest, and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority.»

 

(Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Chapter IV: How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country)

Power concedes nothing

He who accepts evil...