Laird Hamilton on Civil Disobedience (2013)

“There’s a great quote that says, ‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.’ I have children, and we always say the thing that makes kids hard to raise will probably make them great adults. But it’s all that defiance and all those things that society doesn’t want to recognize, or agree with. It’s kind of like they want you to go get in a line, walk over there and go through that door and ‘We’ll tell you what to do,’ and, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ I remember growing up and having teachers tell me, ‘Y’know, you’re not going to be anything,’ ‘You can’t surf for a living,’ ‘You can’t eat your surfboard.’ I mean, I heard it all. But that’s the time when you have to decide if you want to try to live for yourself or you want to try to live for other people.”

(From interview conducted by best-selling author Jake Ducey.)