"The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable; of a bad one, to make it less valuable."
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Quote collection
Henry David Thoreau quotes (page 115 of 139)
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"While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned."
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"It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters."
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"If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself."
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"After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it."
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"The only government that I recognize--and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army--is that power thatestablishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice."
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"I have great faith in a seed."
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"Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season."
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"Wealth is measured by the level of experience in all aspects of life"
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"If some are prosecuted for abusing children, others deserve to be prosecuted for maltreating the face of nature committed to their care."
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"I realized a school doesn't need a School Committee or Trustees or Governors or lumber or approved textbooks. All a school needs is a mind that sends and minds that receive. I shall teach my own students how to teach themselves. My own school. No buildings. Break out of the classroom prison. All I need is SKY. The Universe can be my classroom - the great vast world of the Concord countryside."
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"For in the wood these golden days Some leaf obeys its Maker's call. And through their hollow aisles it plays With delicate touch the prelude of the Fall."
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"Every sunset I witness inspires me with the desire to go to West as distant and as fair as that which the sun goes down. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free."
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"My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I ever expect to see."
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"There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house."
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"A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more "harmonious compositions.""
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"The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages."
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"Behold the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The former has nothing to do in this world; the latter is full of activity. The one looks in the sun until his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his westward course."
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"The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up."
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"That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia."
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