Famous Quotes | “All is quiet at Harper’s...

“All is quiet at Harper’s Ferry,” say the journals. What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force. - Henry David Thoreau
Attribution: Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 429, Houghton Mifflin (1906).

Categories: Author, Brown, John, Government, Naturalist, Philosopher, Slavery

Lookup any word on eNotes with our dictionary. Highlight the word and press SHIFT + D for a definition, or SHIFT + T for a synonym.