““Today we have a very important case for the choice between obedience and disobedience because the nuclear arms race could lead to the most terrible war there has ever been, reducing Europe to complete destruction. Perhaps never as today to ‘disobey’ is to obey the universal conscience; to disobey the written laws is to obey the unwritten law, which tells us to be united with all being; to disobey the cult of the present empires in the name of the community, which will tomorrow be really of everybody.
Conscientious objection is today evolving from being a personal stand in front of the terrible law to have to * “kill” human beings, to becoming a warning to everybody of the terrible danger of atomic destruction. This is a precise example of a disobedience, which would seem individual, and instead becomes a precious good for everyone.”

— Aldo Capitini

Hymn

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Aldo Capitini 47

Italian philosopher and political activist 1899–1968

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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."

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Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

‘In Remembrance of Aldo Capitini’
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“Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane.”

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“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

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Misattributed
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“And the law says, better is a mischief than an inconvenience. By a mischief is meant, when one man or some few men suffer by the hardship of a law, which law is yet useful for the public. But an inconvenience is to have a public law disobeyed or broken, or an offence to go unpunished.”

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in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Basil Blackwell: 1974), p. 183
Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard

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Aldo Capitini 47

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