on being dictated laws

Good men should not obey the law too well
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1872)

Emerson has managed to put here very succinctly a tongue-in-cheek remark I like to make every once in a while: if rules were not supposed to be broken, they would have been natural laws. But of course Emerson being what he was, in a sentence of the same length he has managed to also qualify it by saying who should break laws (good people) and, more importantly, when (not always, nor when it suits them, but when it is clear that the law is counter to the overall "good").

In a limited way, the law does have such provisions (e.g. citizen's arrest). It has a long tradition starting right from manusmriti which is a huge web of rules and exceptions. But this is meant more in the sense of "Civil disobedience" that Thoreau preached (and practiced). It was from there that Mahatma Gandhi as well as Martin Luther King drew their inspiration.

The written word (or the spoken word) is not above everything, especially not above a good purpose.