“Even rulers, notoriously the slowest of men to change, realized that something had to be done.”

"The Obligation to Disobey," Ethics, Vol. 77, No. 3 (April 1967), p. 163

Source: The Twelve Caesars, Titus, Ch. 8

Letter to Abigail Adams (17 July 1775); in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence (1963), vol. 1, p. 216
1770s

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937)
Context: He started off in a low voice, though you could hear every word. They say he could call on the harps of the blessed when he chose. And this was just as simple and easy as a man could talk. But he didn't start out by condemning or reviling. He was talking about the things that make a country a country, and a man a man.
And he began with the simple things that everybody's known and felt — the freshness of a fine morning when you're young, and the taste of food when you're hungry, and the new day that's every day when you're a child. He took them up and he turned them in his hands. They were good things for any man. But without freedom, they sickened. And when he talked of those enslaved, and the sorrows of slavery, his voice got like a big bell. He talked of the early days of America and the men who had made those days. It wasn't a spread-eagle speech, but he made you see it. He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come. And everybody had played a part in it, even the traitors.

Source: They'd Rather Be Right (1954), pp. 29-30.

Book I, fable 10, line 1.
Fables

His Nobel lecture, "How I Discovered Phase Contrast" (11December 1953) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1953/zernike-lecture.html

"The Form of the Sword"
Ficciones (1944)
Context: What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.