≥I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.≤

"It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant ≠ it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery ≠ and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided."

"He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."

≥I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling

in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian

coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead

many minutes. The people said that the elephant had

come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut,

caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back

and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy

season and the ground was soft, and his face had

scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards

long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified

and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was

coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared

and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony.

(Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look

peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked

devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had

stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins

a rabbit.≤

"Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd ≠ seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind."

"The did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all.

Lewis H. Van Dusen is a minority in his belief that breaking the law id never justified. To him there is no purpose for government or law if they are not to be abided by at all times and under all circumstances. His reasoning behind such an extremist belief is that as soon as there begins to be exceptions to laws then one things leads to another, eventually ending in mass disobedience.

there is no man above the law, and there is no man who has the right to break the law. Civil disobedience is not above the law, but against the law.≤

   "All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable."