So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have done in the past? The best solution anyone has come up with is to say that violent revolutions can be avoided (and therefore, violent mobs legitimately suppressed) if 'the people' are understood to have the right to challenge the laws through nonviolent civil disobedience. David Graeber
About This Quote

This quote is an attempt by the author to justify the violation of the law by way of violating it. The author argues that people will not be able to resist unjust authority if they do not have the right to defy the law and that people should bend and break laws as necessary in order to prevent unjust authority from being carried out.

Source: The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

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  2. At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as...

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