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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
Tyranny
Recognize
Refuse
Revolution
Government
Unendurable
Right
Inefficiency
Great
Allegiance
Men
Resist

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If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
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Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
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Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
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I have seen more men than usual, lately and, well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are.
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It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever.
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Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
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As for health, consider yourself well.
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I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.
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Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.
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I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.
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I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.
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Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
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Go confidently ... Live the life that you imagined.
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Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment
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Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
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If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.
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There are many skillful apprentices, but few master workmen.
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The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.
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All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.
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The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.
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