None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Interpretation
Disobedience is essential for true freedom, while blind obedience leads to enslavement.
Henry David Thoreau's quote emphasizes the idea that true liberty arises from disobedience to unjust laws and norms. In his view, those who blindly obey authorities are not exercising their freedom but rather submitting to a form of mental and moral slavery, thus losing their autonomy and ability to think critically about their lives and society.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a speech on civil rights movements.
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable.
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.
That grand old poem called Winter
Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle afer cycle, by force and bloodshed.
I speak to the paper, as I speak to the first person I meet.
A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
God made only water, but man made wine.
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.
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