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19th Century
Henry David Thoreau
1817–1862 · Civil disobedience
When the state is unjust, withdraw your consent.
In their words
“That government is best which governs not at all.”
Jailed overnight for refusing a tax that supported slavery, Thoreau wrote that unjust law obliges the just person to break it, and that a government resting on the consent of a few is already dissolving. Civil Disobedience gave Gandhi and King their grammar. His essays on walking and wilderness made the same case against a different trespass, the industrial one.
Why it matters for freedom
He gave civil disobedience its modern form: the individual conscience outranks the majority's convenience.
Who they stood against
the Mexican War, slavery, and a state that taxed him for both