Civil disobedience

"The central principle of Fritz Bauers career was that Germans should hold judgement upon themselves. [...] Those Germans whom he was prosecuting were committing crimes against humanity. The laws of the Nazi state were illegitimate. One cannot defend ones actions by saying that one was obeying those laws. There is no law that can justify a crime against humanity. Everybody must have his own sense of right and wrong and must obey it, independently of what a state government says."

"Closely allied with this earnest longing to see and know the truth, is a kind of dignified and princely sentiment which forbids a mind, naturally well constituted, … to yield obedience to any orders but such as are at once just, lawful, and founded on utility."

"We must obey God rather than men."

"Social protest and even civil disobedience serve the laws need for growth. Ideally, reform would come according to reason and justice without self-help and disturbing, almost violent, forms of protest. … Still, candor compels one here again to acknowledge the gap between the ideal and the reality. Short of the millennium, sharp changes in the law depend partly upon the stimulus of protest."

"If a law commands me to sin I will break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly. The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians."

"Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from ones opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth."

"How does the fact that ten men may choose to join together for their common protection, impose upon the eleventh man any obligation to go along with them?"

"I died to the law so that I might live for God."

"It is not just a concept that indulges protesters, it is a device that stabilizes government, promotes order rather than chaos, and productively ameliorates the tensions of pluralism. Most directly, civil disobedience constitutes a stabilizing or corrective device, allowing a democratic system to rectify its mistakes. By standing on the border between legal protest and rebellion, civil disobedience serves as a firebreak preventing the disaffected from inching toward rebellion. To illuminate this same concept, envision civil disobedience as a safety valve, drawing off dissent before that unrest boils over into more severe law breaking."

"One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

"An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."

"Men of the most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law."