Will Rogers Quotes

If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

I can never feel that setting fire to houses and churches and litter boxes and destroying valuable pictures really helps to convince people that women ought to be enfranchised.

I organized tax resistance in 1965, with a friend. I kept at it for about ten years. I don't see it as a principle, it's a tactic. And I felt I had exhausted its potential as a tactic right about then, so I stopped.

We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.

How many of you are willing to go to jail for freedom?

Civil disobedients are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.

I am certainly willing to fight for America as well as vote, but I shall fight just the way you did in the Civil War—at the end of a goose quill pen

I want you to leave here with a sense of mission. Martin Luther King is waiting for you to march with him.

I hope to get the general public listening, the ones curious to see the woman who sat in the tree for two years.

Civil disobedience has almost always been about expression. Generally, it's nonviolent, as defined by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.

Rosa Parks inspired me to find a way to get in the way, to get in trouble... good trouble, necessary trouble.

On some campuses, change is effected through nonviolent or even violent means.

I'd been focused on trying to start civil disobedience since 2010. I'd tried many things and they hadn't worked. So I went on a retreat and prayed, with some psychedelic medicines. It was really intense and I prayed for what I called the codes for social change and within a month my prayer was answered.

I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.

You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.

It's the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I'm always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands.

There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest.

I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time. I'd say, okay, let's get with it, we'll all be nonviolent. But I don't go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody's going to be nonviolent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. If they make the White Citizens Council nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. But as long as you've got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don't want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.

Revolt by all means, but only on one issue at a time. To do more would be to confuse the whips.

If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.

In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.

The newspaper is under fire for refusing to kowtow to left-wing word police and militant propagandists who demand unfettered illegal immigration. Last week, in the wake of angry protests against the publication, vandals threw paint bombs and spray-painted graffiti on its offices.

I believe in civil disobedience among other forms of resistance in times when it's called for.

If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco

My brother and I met several times during that weekend trying to figure out what we were each going to do, and we met for breakfast the morning of the sit-in and I had decided that I was going to go get arrested, and he decided that he was going to have the harder job and go tell our parents that I'd been arrested.