Henry David Thoreau

1817 – 1862

American writer, philosopher, and naturalist famous for his observations of the natural world during his two-year stay alone at Walden Pond. In 1846 Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax to protest the Mexican War. He was released the following day after a friend paid the fee. This led to his essay “Civil Disobedience,” which explores the responsibilities of a citizen faced with an unjust law or government. The essay influenced the thinking of both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. In his autobiography King wrote, “I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest.”

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison…If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person.”

“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 most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a 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 majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?…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 that 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…Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

"If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished...”

Source: Civil Disobedience (1849)