Refusal Quotes

“General strike”

“Refusal of work”

“Civil disobedience”

“Nonviolent resistance”

“Conscientious objector”

“I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey.”

“Do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of heaven.”

“The poor were wise, who, by the rich oppressed,
Withdrew, and sought a secret place of rest.”

“Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.”

“Wiktionary: Refusal”

“Those who take money are bound to carry out the work for which they get a fee, while I, because I refuse to take it, am not obliged to talk with anyone against my will.”

“People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.”

“We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsmen of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.”

“Thoreau's disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won't live in your world. I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it.”

“We refuse to have our conscience bound by any work or law. ... Our stubbornness is right, because we want to preserve the liberty which we have in Christ. Only by preserving our liberty shall we be able to retain the truth of the Gospel inviolate.”

“For La Boétie as for Machiavelli, authority can only be grounded on acceptance by the subjects: except that the one teaches the prince how to compel their acquiescence, while the other reveals to the people the power that would lie in their refusal.”

“Regnare nolo: ditescere non libet: prae turam recuso, scortationem odi: navigare ob insatiabilem avaritiam non cupio: de coronis consequendis non dimico: liber sum ab insana gloria cupiditate: mortem contemno: guovis morbi genere superior sum: maror animum non peredit.”

“The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.”

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
She has become a dwelling place for demons,
a haunt for every unclean spirit. ...
Come out of her, my people,
lest you take part in her sins,
lest you share in her plagues;
for her sins are heaped high as heaven,
and God has remembered her iniquities.”

“REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; as an elderly maiden's hand in marriage, to a rich and handsome suitor; a valuable franchise to a rich corporation, by an alderman; absolution to an impenitent king, by a priest, and so forth. Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive.”