I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
Refuse
I had felt for a long time that, if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.
Keep your feet on the ground, but let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average or to surrender to the chill of your spiritual environment.
Do not calculate what I have done, for I shall accept no recompense. Calculate the public advantage, the welfare and liberty of my country, and believe that I shall refuse no burden, no danger, provided that, at the hour of tranquillity, I may return to private life, for there now remains but one step for my ambition – that of arriving at zero.
If companies can refuse to provide coverage for women, what other objections to the Affordable Care Act will we see based on ‘religious grounds’? For that matter, will ‘religious freedom’ be used as an excuse to discriminate against other minorities and disenfranchised groups across the board? Where will it end?
The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
The laws recognize no obligation on the part of the slave to labor for or serve his master. If he refuse to labor, the law will not interfere to compel him. The master must do his own flogging, as in the case of an ox or a horse.
By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?
The backwoodsmen are muttering about making Britain’s draconian union laws – already among the toughest in Europe – harsher still. And parts of the media will continue to attack public service pensions, as if school meals staff, refuse collectors and healthcare workers have no right to a decent retirement.
Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has – from industrial age to information age – there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.