Lyndsey Stonebridge > Quotes

“Acts of civil disobedience were neither the sheer lawlessness of criminals nor the rejection of law itself by anarchists and terrorists. Instead, in civil disobedience, Hannah Arendt saw how the moral act of individual conscience—I cannot live with myself if I consent to this—could sometimes also become a political act. Civil disobedience happens when people are not heard and when a significant number of people see that their government is clearly heading in a lawless direction. The civil disobedient, Arendt said, acts in the name and for the sake of a group; he defies the law and the established authorities on the ground of basic dissent. The civil disobedient is not lawless, she is acting together with others precisely in the spirit of the laws—breathing together, Arendt says.”
― Lyndsey Stonebridge, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience