[...] Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced, I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me to obey a higher law than I. They forced me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceived that, when an acorn and the chestnut fall side-by-side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best as they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If applied cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.- Henry David Thoreau
from Civil Disobedience
