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If private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services.

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
Office
Offices
Protect
Hired
Becomes
Obliged
Justice
Services
Menial
Government
Indifferent
Clerk
Men
Perform
Dispense
Private
Clerks
Weak
Abolition

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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
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Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses.
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Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.
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Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.
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It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere for that will leaven the whole lump.
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Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!
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When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.
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Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.
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How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden all world-ridden.
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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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We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.
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A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.
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The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects.
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A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government.
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Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
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All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
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I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.
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But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.
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Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
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The perception of beauty is a moral test.
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