On conscience..............................

     After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are the most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.  But government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.  Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? - in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable?  Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?  Why has every man a conscience then?  I think we should be men first and subjects afterward.  It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.  The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.  It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.  Law never made man a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

-Henry David Thoreau,  culled from his essay Civil Disobedience