Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in a government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
     -- Civil Disobedience
 

...I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject....
     -- Civil Disobedience
 

Law never made men a whit more just....
      -- Civil Disobedience
 

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
     -- Walden
 

Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.
     -- Walden
 

Some evidence is very circumstantial, as when you find a trout in the milk.
     -- Journal, 11 November 1854
 

I heartily accept the motto, -- "That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
     -- Civil Disobedience, 1848 
 

You must everywhere build on piles of your own driving.
     -- Walden
 

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.
     -- Walden
 

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.
     -- "Night and Moonlight"
 

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
     -- Walden
 

No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.  
     -- Walden
 

We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives.
     -- A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers