Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Every generation is confronted anew with the task not to look the other way when injustice occurs. ... Everyone is responsible for what he does and co-responsible for what he lets happen.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.

We're supposed to be an example of freedom, and if we are doing things that are injustice to people, then what is our statement?

Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act, we become a party to injustice.

It’s every man’s business to see justice done.

Life is moral responsibility.

I'm a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother's keeper.

You can't remain inactive in the face of injustice without, to some extent, being guilty of it.

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others... When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers ... we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

Passivity is the same as defending injustice.

I just feel like if I really believe what Dr. King said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,' then I should be compelled to use my God-given platform to effect change.

Some laws are wrong, and we have an obligation to speak out against those laws wherever they are.

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

If a policy is wrongheaded, feckless and corrupt, I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.

Every lawsuit results from somebody doing something wrong. If everybody did right, we wouldn't need laws.

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.

I cannot sit by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

No man ought to be condemned for exhorting people to pursue justice in a certain line, though he may foresee that in the pursuit of that justice the opposition given to those who are proceeding in a just course may produce collision, and that collision lead to the commission of crime; but our duty, as I conceive, is to seek for the injustice, and there to impute the crime… It is to that injustice, and not to those who pursue a just course for the attainment of a right end, that the guilt is to be ascribed.

Silence is complicity. I believe that.

When you see corruption, when you see injustice, you speak up. You don't just shut up and say it's none of my business.

Some emotions are essential to law and to public principles of justice: anger at wrongdoing, fear for our safety, compassion for the pain of others, all these are good reasons to make laws that protect people in their rights.