Civil Obedience Quotes

Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it ...
In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did. ~ Howard Zinn

War -- is a last ditch moral nightmare. People begin worshiping a mysterious slouching beast, following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero; and worse. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life; that roughshod trek of war and warmakers throughout the world, hand in hand with death. Long live death!

They wouldn't worship it if they weren't in love. Or if they weren't in fear. The second being a state of devouring, at least, as the first. I think the clue is the second masquerading as the first -- just as the beast is the ape of god; to do some thing successfully, you have to, above all, hide what your up to. In this way fear can ape love. Death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God.

Such reflections are of course ill at ease by some: those to whom the state is a given, the church is a given, Western culture a given, war a given, consumerism a given, paying taxes a given. All the neat slots of existence into which one fits, birth to death and every point in between. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. One is carried along, a zonked spectator...

Every nation-state tends towards the imperial -- that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police propaganda courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civi ~ Daniel Berrigan

Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. ~ Daniel Berrigan

The problem in this world is not civil disobedience ... th e problem in this world is civil obedience. ~ Howard Zinn

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders ... and millions have been killed because of this obedience ... Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves ... (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. ~ Howard Zinn

The role of any person in this world is to be themselves without damaging the rest. We are important as long as the rest "is". - Rossana Condoleo ~ Rossana Condoleo

Through Khadi we teach the people the art of civil obedience to an institution which they have built up for themselves. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory. ~ Richard M. Weaver

Mrs. Parks' act of brave defiance rocked the foundation of American society and inspired generations of civil rights leaders and created a sense of hope for every American facing legal discrimination in this country. ~ Kendrick Meek

Mother's Day really was in its origin an antiwar day, an antiwar statement. Julia Ward Howe was sickened by what had happened during the Civil War, the loss of life, the carnage, and she created Mother's Day as a call for women all over the world to come together and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict. ~ Gloria Steinem

Man was born free, but...he is in chains. Chains made of duty, hunger, fear. Chains hammered to our necks by a race that we lifted up. A race that we empowered. Not to rule, not to reign, but to lead us from a world torn by war and greed. Instead, they have led us into darkness. They expect your obedience, ignore your sacrifice, and hoard the prosperity that your hands create. To hold tight to their reign, they forbid our dreams. ~ Pierce Brown

For the other end of the spectrum, the 50 to 85 percent of the world's population who are not the recipients of privilege, the world they know is almost certainly worse than any their earlier counterparts knew. It is likely they are worse off materially, despite the technological changes. In substantive as opposed to formal terms, they are more, not less, subject to arbitrary constraints, since the central mechanisms are more pervasive and more efficient. And they bear the brunt of the various kinds of psychic malaise, as well as of the destructiveness of civil wars. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

Just what is the civil law? What neither influence can affect, nor power break, nor money corrupt: were it to be suppressed or even merely ignored or inadequately observed, no one would feel safe about anything, whether his own possessions, the inheritance he expects from his father, or the bequests he makes to his children. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery. ~ Frederick Douglass

[The POUM] posters, designed for a wider public (posters are important in Spain, with its large illiterate population). ~ George Orwell

To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare's startlingly original insights into Elizabethan England are what allow his work to speak to us today. Reading Shakespeare, we know what it is like, in any age, to be alive. So it is with Moby-Dick, a novel about a whaling voyage to the Pacific that is also about America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War and so much more. Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country's ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

Uncritical followership and habits of silent obedience give rise to the corruptions of power, or sometimes simply to avoidable catastrophes. For ~ Jonathan Sacks

Slaughter personified to him every evil of this war. It would never end for Tom until he had dealt with Slaughter. His chance had been delayed last night. The next time he encountered the Colonel, he'd kill him. ~ C.G. Faulkner

When I came back into show business in '88 after spending 20-odd years in the civil service, it wasn't planned. ~ Pete Best

An overwhelming number of economists, international civil servants, and policy-makers argue that a fragmentation of the Eurozone would cause a new depression and massive wealth destruction around the world. It would also end the period of economic integration that has characterized world politics since the end of the Cold War. ~ Klaus Schwab

There are rules and laws to help ensure our physical safety. Likewise, the Lord has provided guidelines and commandments to help ensure our spiritual safety so that we might successfully navigate this often-treacherous mortal existence and return eventually to our Heavenly Father" ("Obedience Brings Blessings," April 2013 General Conference). ~ Thomas S. Monson

The so-called civil rights movement as it exists today is used as a Communist program for revolution in America. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

When you have a liberal class that no longer functions, when those people who traditionally defend and care about a civil society no longer do so, then you cede power to very frightening, deformed figures, all of which we are watching leap up around the fringes of our political establishment - this lunatic fringe, which has largely taken over the Republican Party. ~ Chris Hedges

We must continue to be diligent in protecting Americans' civil liberties while preserving critical law enforcement tools we need to keep America safe. ~ Debbie Stabenow

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct. ~ Henri Rousseau

Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law. ~ Iris Chang

And to me, that's why the civil rights era is about the future, not about the past, because it's great lessons of how citizens can organize to call on the patriotic heritage of the country to tackle some of our most intractable problems and we need to do that again. ~ Taylor Branch

Thinking is indispensable on the path to passion for God. Thinking is not an end in itself. Nothing but God himself is finally an end in itself. Thinking is not the goal of life. Thinking can be the ground for boasting. Thinking, without prayer, without the Holy Spirit, without obedience, without love, will puff up and destroy (1 Cor. 8:1).
But thinking under the mighty hand of God, thinking soaked in prayer, thinking carried by the Holy Spirit, thinking tethered to the Bible, thinking in pursuit of more reasons to praise and proclaim the glories of God, thinking in the service of love
such thinking is indispensable in a life of fullest praise to God. ~ John Piper

You want to make America great again? Make racism wrong again! ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

And, at night, in a narrow bed in her old room, Mary Morevna would hold Ivan tight inside of her, demanding his obedience to her, demanding that his soul be ripped out and emptied into her. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Aeroplanes are not designed by science, but by art in spite of some pretence and humbug to the contrary. I do not mean to suggest that engineering can do without science, on the contrary, it stands on scientific foundations, but there is a big gap between scientific research and the engineering product which has to be bridged by the art of the engineer. ~ Isambard Kingdom Brunel

We are taught in an especial manner to pray that God would give his Holy Spirit unto us, that through his aid and assistance we may live unto God in that holy obedience which he requires at our hands. ~ John Owen

That Jesus' task "is consummated" must be true, because he says so (John 19:30). Yet what a spectacle of failure! His word rejected, his message misunderstood, his commands ignored. None the less, his appointed task is accomplished, through obedience to the death - that obedience whose purity counterbalances the sins of a world. That Jesus delivered his message is what counts - not the world's reaction; and once proclaimed, that message can never be silenced, but will knock on men's hearts to the last day. ~ Romano Guardini

We may be annihilated, but we cannot be conquered. ~ Albert Sidney Johnston

The settled opinion here is that religion is essentially distinct from Civil Govt. and exempt from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to both ... ~ James Madison

He who obeys with modesty appears worthy of being some day a commander. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The sense of mystery must always be, for mystery means being guided by obedience to Someone Who knows more than I do. ~ Oswald Chambers

We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs. ~ James L. Farmer, Jr.

The conservative ideology sees LGBT rights as an affront to the traditional way of life, for some reason. We are attacked as phonies, pretenders, even perverts, just for being who we are. There are people who wish for us to go back into the shadows, the closet, never to return.

Many of these people who wish to deny us our very legitimacy, who denounce us as mentally ill deviants, spend an hour each week paying homage to an ever-present, yet non-interventionist man in the sky. They go to courts across the land to defend their right to praise that uncorroborated deity at the expense of other people's civil liberties. To them, we the living, the transgender people who walk the earth, are fake, but the man up there, He is real. ~ Ian Thomas Malone

So why'd you flake out on the party?"

"I wasn't in the mood. I kept picturing you crying here alone and pity won out."

"I'm not crying, jackass." I point to the boring-ass milk documentary that's flashing on the TV screen. "I'm learning about pasteurization."

She stares at me. "You guys pay money to subscribe to a gazillion channels and this is what you choose to watch?"

"Well, I flipped by it and saw a bunch of cow udders, and, well, you know, it turned me on, so - "

"EW!"

I burst out laughing. "Kidding, babe. If you must know, the batteries in the remote died and I was too lazy to get up and change the channel. I was watching this wicked-awesome miniseries about the Civil War before cow udders came on. ~ Elle Kennedy

Black power got to moving so fast that we miscalculated the fallout. I certainly have to take some of the responsibility of that; but there was no way we anticipated the response. ~ Cleveland Sellers

Comparison is often why our important roles shrink to seem so insignificant. Comparison robs us of the joy of obedience. ~ Jennie Allen

Talks since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 when the Republic of China government ~ Anonymous

The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened. ~ Timothy B. Tyson

There is no relationship here between Church and State. Religious liberty has its unalterable place, along with civil and human liberty, in the very foundation of the Republic. I hold it [religious intolerance] to be a menace to the very liberties which we boast and cherish. ~ Warren G. Harding

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois