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All men recognize the right of revolution that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Revolution
Government
Unendurable
Right
Inefficiency
Great
Allegiance
Men
Resist
Tyranny
Recognize
Refuse

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What the first philosopher taught the last will have to repeat.
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If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there arenight owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.
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I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
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If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.
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Who is old enough to have learned from experience?
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The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.
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The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.
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For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.
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All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
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I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it.
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If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.
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The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
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Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.
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A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.
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The Slothful do not have the time to become virtuous or despicable.
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A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep.
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The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
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Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.
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The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions.
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That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
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