“And when He was accused of the chief priests and elders, He answered nothing.”—Saint Matthew.
“The most dangerous foe to truth and freedom among us is the solid majority.... The majority has might,—unhappily,—but right it has not. I, and the few, the individuals, are right.”
Dr. Stockman, in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.
“Should you say to him, ‘But you injure your brother men by accepting a remuneration below the value of your labour, and you sin against God and your own soul by obeying laws which are unjust,’ he will answer you with the fixed gaze of one who understands you not.... Human laws are only good and valid in so far as they conform to, explain, and apply the law of God. They are evil whensoever they contrast with or oppose it; and it is then not only your right, but your duty, to disobey and abolish them.”—Mazzini.
“To profit by all the circumstances of life, to make one’s acts accord with one’s ideas, is to carry on a propagande par le fait of a slow but continuous action which must produce its results.”—
Jean Grave.
WHEN that great and original child of nature, Thoreau, the Hermit of Walden, protested against the collection of taxes in Concord town, he little suspected, probably, that he was prefiguring a revolutionary movement which, before the century was over, was to alarm the sleek and the smug of the Old World and the New; and yet, whether Thoreau realised it or not, his attitude was the anarchistic attitude and his act an act of the propagande par l’exemple.
The attitude of the American anti-slavery champion, William Lloyd Garrison, was also essentially anarchistic.