Lew Wallace Quotes

I'd rather die standing than live on my knees.

When I don't feel free and can't do what I want I just react. I go against it.

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Except in Haiti, nowhere in the world have we resisted you. We have suffered, we have grown dull and like cattle under a whip, obeyed. Why? Because, m'sieu, we have no pride! And we have no pride because we have nothing to remember.... While I live I shall try to build that pride we need, and build it in terms white men as well as black can understand. I am thinking of the future, m'sieu, not of now. I will teach pride if my teaching breaks every back in my kingdom.

He that is taken and put into prisoner chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence.

They can't hurt me. Sure, they can crush you and kill you. They can lay you out on 42nd and Broadway and put hoses on you and flush you in the sewers and put you on the subway and carry you out to Coney island and bury you on the Ferris wheel. But I refuse to sit here and worry about dying.

They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed.

Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours...then surely it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.

Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom.

Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

Dignity belongs to the conquered.

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Disobedience is essentially a prideful power struggle against someone in authority over us. It can be a parent, a priesthood leader, a teacher, or ultimately God. A proud person hates the fact that someone is above him. He thinks this lowers his position.

One of the greatest rebels, who I really admire: Christ. He was a rebel. He ended up being crucified. He was a great rebel. He rebelled against the established power that subjugated.

Even rats can only be kicked around for so long before they've had enough.

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

Denounce me for advocating freedom if you can, and I will bear your curse with a better resignation.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority!

The willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God or man.

Better to die on one's feet than live on one’s knees., Mejor morir a pie que vivir rodillas.