Paul Watson Quotes

Should one break in and free the animals? That is illegal, but the obligation to obey the law is not absolute. It was justifiably broken by those who helped runaway slaves in the American South, to mention only one possible parallel.

Civil disobedience is not only the natural right of a people, especially when they have no effective voice in their own Government, but that it is also a substitute for violence or armed rebellion.

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness.

I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.

Civil disobedience is a preparation for mute suffering.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

Civil disobedience is the assertion of a right which law should give but which it denies.

Civil disobedience presupposes willing obedience of our self-imposed rules, and without it civil disobedience would be a cruel joke.

The highest form of patriotism is dissent.

Call it peace or call it treason / call it love or call it reason / but I ain't marching anymore

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them?

To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.

If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.

Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot

We shall strike. We shall organize boycotts. We shall demonstrate and have political campaigns. We shall pursue the revolution we have proposed. We are sons and daughters of the farm workers' revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking bread and justice.

Yes, he [Mahatma Gandhi] was a great man. However...between me and Gandhi there was never the understanding there was between me and my father.

... true civil disobedience ... compels the state to resort to power.

The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable.

From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.

What I call the law of satyagraha is to be deduced from an appreciation of duties and rights flowing therefrom.