Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one's beloved extended community.

So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have done in the past? The best solution anyone has come up with is to say that violent revolutions can be avoided (and therefore, violent mobs legitimately suppressed) if 'the people' are understood to have the right to challenge the laws through nonviolent civil disobedience.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.

The leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using Black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing Black culture to 'vindicate' Black people.

I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

Disobedience to rigid laws is a revolutionary act.

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

The only safe and honorable course for a self-respecting man is to do what I have decided to do, that is, to submit without protest to the penalty of disobedience ... not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.

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

If however the law is so promulgated that it of necessity makes you an agent of injustices against another, then I say to you ... break the law.