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Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man?
Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
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birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Democracy
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More quotes by Henry David Thoreau
The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.
Henry David Thoreau
You may raise enough money to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business.
Henry David Thoreau
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
Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere.
Henry David Thoreau
Alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.
Henry David Thoreau
Be not anxious to avoid poverty. In this way the wealth of the universe may be securely invested.
Henry David Thoreau
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Henry David Thoreau
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.
Henry David Thoreau
I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Henry David Thoreau
When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.
Henry David Thoreau
By what a delicate and far-stretched contribution every island is made! What an enterprise of nature thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry.
Henry David Thoreau
We find it difficult to choose our direction because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
Henry David Thoreau
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Henry David Thoreau
I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them.
Henry David Thoreau
We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.
Henry David Thoreau
This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.
Henry David Thoreau
News Coverage!! As news expose rather than cover events.
Henry David Thoreau
For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.
Henry David Thoreau
