David Thoreau Quotes

• I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Writing, Ideas, Evil

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• Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. I think that I probably have grown up to have a Thoreauvian perspective on many things. Though in other ways I live a life he would not have approved of. He believed to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make your life very clear and plain and meditative and not confused. Sometimes my life, in fact, is confused.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Confused, Independent, Thinking

  "America's Foremost Woman of Letters". American Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

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• If there is innocence on Earth again, I tend to imagine it in more [Henry David]Thoreau sort of terms.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Earth, Innocence, Imagine

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

  Robert Hass

  Land, Imagination, People

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• Parents often give middle names just so that later, when they're yelling at the kid, they can drag it out. Henry David Thoreau, you come in here this instant!

  Paul Reiser

  Kids, Yelling, Names

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• The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

  Tony Robbins

  Book, Reading, Thinking

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• If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Henry David Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Chicago, Encounters

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• Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn't brotherly -- who lived mostly under his parents' roof . . . who advocated one day's work and six days "off" as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown . . . is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.

  Edward Hoagland

  Parent, One Day, Days Off

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• I like the story about Henry David Thoreau, who, when he was on his death bed, his family sent for a minister. The minister said, 'Henry, have you made your peace with God?' Thoreau said, 'I didn't know we'd quarreled.

  Stewart Udall

  Bed, Stories, Peace With God

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• I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Classic, Select, Emily

  CNN's Book Chat, www.cnn.com.

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