Address given in towns of Ontario county, prior to her trial, quoted in "An account of the proceedings on the trial of Susan B. Anthony, on the charge of illegal voting, at the presidential election in Nov. 1872, and on the trial of Beverly W. Jones, Edwin T. Marsh and William B. Hall, the inspectors of election by whom her vote was received." (1873) http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/naw:@field(DOCID+@lit(rbnawsan2152div13)); also quoted in Great American Trials: 201 Compelling Courtroom Dramas (1994) by Edward W. Knappman, p. 167
Context: We no longer petition legislature or Congress to give of the right to vote, but appeal to women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected "citizen's right" … We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution the constitutions of the several states … propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights. … One half of the people of this Nation today are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write a new and just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation — that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent — that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers — that robs them, in marriage of the custody of their own persons, wages, and children—are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half.
1960s, (1963)
Nobel lecture (2001)
Context: Today, in Afghanistan, a girl will be born. Her mother will hold her and feed her, comfort her and care for her — just as any mother would anywhere in the world. In these most basic acts of human nature, humanity knows no divisions. But to be born a girl in today's Afghanistan is to begin life centuries away from the prosperity that one small part of humanity has achieved. It is to live under conditions that many of us in this hall would consider inhuman.
I speak of a girl in Afghanistan, but I might equally well have mentioned a baby boy or girl in Sierra Leone. No one today is unaware of this divide between the world’s rich and poor. No one today can claim ignorance of the cost that this divide imposes on the poor and dispossessed who are no less deserving of human dignity, fundamental freedoms, security, food and education than any of us. The cost, however, is not borne by them alone. Ultimately, it is borne by all of us — North and South, rich and poor, men and women of all races and religions.
Today's real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another.
1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Source: Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Context: One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. 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."
The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 46.
1930
Context: There is a saying as old as the Greeks that it is more important to form good habits than to frame good laws. There is an undercurrent of suspicion that this is true and that, like patriotism, legislation is not enough. The hopes held out when laws are framed are not always realised when laws are passed... What happens to all the laws placed on the statute book? If half the hopes of their promoters had been realised, would not the millennium have arrived ere this?
Writing for the court, Korematsu v. United States, 33 U.S. 124 (1944).
“A good many people today feel our present draft laws are unjust. These people are called soldiers.”
"An Editorial: Are Our Draft Laws Unfair?", The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, unidentified episode
Featured in Pat Paulsen for President (1968), part 2 of 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbP0ufyax5A&feature=relmfu, 02:42 ff (11:42 ff in full program)
Alternative version archived at "Should Television Shows Be Censored?" http://www.paulsen.com/censor.html, Paulsen.com, October 29, 1967
Context: A good many people today feel our present draft laws are unjust. These people are called soldiers. In one of the arguments against the draft, we hear it is unfair, immoral, discourages young men from studying, ruins their careers and their lives. Picky, picky, picky! We propose a draft lottery, in which the names of all eligible males will be put into a hat, and the men will be drafted according to their hat sizes. The tiny heads will go into the military service, and the fat heads will go into government.
“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does”
“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Opening paragraph of his review of Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, p. 123
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)
