Skip to content

Quotes from A Plea for Captain John Brown — Henry David Thoreau

1817–1862 United States

← All quotes by Henry David Thoreau

6 quotes

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him.

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army — is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Henry David Thoreau (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.