On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

"Thoreau is more relevant than ever" Boston Globe

"I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn." Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Thoreau's concept of Civil Disobedience inspired many public figures whose actions altered the flow of history: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy; and influenced writers including Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, and William Butler Yeats. 

In On the Duty of Civil Disobedience Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule our conscience that we have a duty to avoid enabling the government to make us agents of injustice. 

"I read Henry David Thoreau's essay [and] was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times 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." Martin Luther King, Jr. 

This edition includes Ralph Waldo Emerson's tribute to Thoreau, originally published in 1862. Emerson's work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present, including William James and Nietzsche. 

"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

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