Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American essayist, philosopher, naturalist, and abolitionist whose single night in jail for refusing to pay taxes produced one of the most consequential political essays ever written. His 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” — declaring that “government is best which governs not at all” — provided the philosophical blueprint that Tolstoy carried into Christian anarchism, Gandhi into Indian independence, and King into the American civil rights movement. Jeff Riggenbach of the Mises Institute called him “one of the founding fathers of American libertarian thought.” Murray Rothbard placed him alongside Jefferson, Cobden, and Spencer as an intellectual forbear of the modern libertarian movement. George Woodcock, in his classic Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962), assessed that while Emerson “cannot be regarded as a complete anarchist,” Thoreau was “another kettle of fish altogether” — his “condemnation of the state was more thorough, and in many other ways he fits more closely into the anarchist pattern than Emerson could ever do.” He was a man who did not merely theorise about the withdrawal of consent. He lived it — methodically, completely, and at personal cost — from tax resistance to voluntary simplicity to the Underground Railroad to the defence of armed rebellion against the slave state.

The Pencil-Maker’s Son

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau on 12 July 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town about twenty miles northwest of Boston. His father, John Thoreau Sr., had drifted through occupations — farmer, shopkeeper, teacher, travelling salesman trading with Native American tribes on the Massachusetts frontier — before settling permanently in Concord in 1823 to manufacture pencils. His mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, took in boarders to supplement the family income, filling the household with visiting reformers, lecturers, and progressive thinkers. The Thoreau dinner table was an informal salon of radical New England thought long before Henry became its most famous product.

He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia. None of the four children would ever marry. All three of his siblings would die of tuberculosis — Helen at thirty-seven, John at twenty-seven, and Sophia outliving Henry by fourteen years before the same disease took her. Henry himself would die of it at forty-four. The family pencil business, modest as it was, would become America’s finest, largely because of Henry’s own research into German graphite techniques — a fact worth remembering when critics later accused him of being impractical. He was, when he chose to be, a meticulous engineer.

Thoreau entered Harvard in 1833 at the age of sixteen. He took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science, and was by all accounts a quiet, serious student rather than a brilliant one. According to legend, he refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma, remarking that the college offered it to graduates “who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college.” His comment — “Let every sheep keep its own skin” — was a reference to the sheepskin vellum used for diplomas, but it was also the first recorded instance of Thoreau refusing to pay an institution for the privilege of being credentialed by it. It would not be the last.

Upon graduating in 1837, he reversed his given names and began calling himself Henry David — a small but telling act of self-authorship, the kind of deliberate claim to sovereignty over one’s own identity that would characterise everything he did afterward.

The Teacher Who Would Not Strike

Thoreau’s first job was as schoolmaster of the Concord Centre School, the town’s main public school, where he was responsible for roughly one hundred boys. The year was 1837, and America was in economic depression; teaching was one of the few positions available. His friend Ellery Channing later recalled that Thoreau introduced himself to his class by “announcing that he should not flog, but would talk morals as a punishment instead.”

Within a fortnight, a member of the school committee — Deacon Nehemiah Ball — visited the classroom, found the noise level too high and the discipline too slack, and instructed the young teacher to use corporal punishment more often. What Thoreau did next was characteristic. He selected six students at random, whipped them without cause, and resigned the same evening. The act was a piece of bitter theatre: if the system demanded that children be beaten, he would demonstrate the absurdity by beating them arbitrarily, then refuse to participate further. It was civil disobedience eleven years before he coined the term.

He later wrote to Orestes Brownson that the cowhide was “a nonconductor. Methinks that, unlike the electric wire, not a single spark of truth is ever transmitted through its agency to the slumbering intellect it would address.” In its place he proposed a radical alternative: “I would make education a pleasant thing both to the teacher and the scholar. We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.”

In 1838, Thoreau and his older brother John opened the Concord Academy, a private school where they pioneered what would now be called progressive education — nature walks, visits to local businesses, hands-on learning, and the abolition of corporal punishment. Emerson would later eulogise Thoreau as “the captain of a huckleberry party,” a reference to his habit of leading students and village children on long rambles through the Concord woods. The brothers worked well together. In September 1839, they took a two-week boating trip up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to Mount Washington — a journey that Henry would later memorialise in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).

It was the last good year.

The Brother

On New Year’s Day 1842, John Thoreau Jr. — twenty-seven years old, Henry’s closest friend and collaborator — nicked the tip of his ring finger while stropping his razor. The cut was trivial. He replaced the skin, wrapped it, and thought nothing of it. Eight days later, the wound had turned black and gangrenous. On the morning of 9 January, his jaw muscles began to stiffen. By evening, lockjaw — tetanus — had set in.

A Boston doctor was sent for and arrived the next day. He examined John and pronounced the case hopeless. Hearing this, John said: “The cup that my Father gives me, shall I not drink it?” He bade his friends goodbye. He mentioned the name of his friend William Stevens Robinson twice. Then he died on Tuesday, 11 January 1842, at two o’clock in the afternoon, in his brother Henry’s arms.

Henry was destroyed. He could not get out of bed for four weeks. On 22 January, eleven days after John’s death, he developed all the physical symptoms of lockjaw himself — stiffening jaw, spasms, the full clinical presentation. He had not cut himself. His skin was not broken. Tetanus is not contagious. Emerson, alarmed, wrote to his brother William: “I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth.” It was a sympathetic reaction, the body expressing what the mind could not contain. He recovered after two days, but it was a week more before he could write any letters.

In his journal, Thoreau made no direct mention of John’s tortured death. On 20 February, he wrote: “The death of friends should inspire us as much as their lives. If they are great and rich enough, they will leave consolation to the mourners before the expenses of their funerals.” The next day: “I must confess there is nothing so strange to me as my own body.”

The school closed. The river trip that had been the happiest experience of their shared life became the subject of Henry’s first book — an elegy disguised as a travel narrative, written at Walden Pond three years later, in a cabin built partly to find the solitude in which to mourn.

The Experiment

Work in the pencil factory was tedious and exhausting. His mother’s boarders filled the house with noise. He had failed to break into the New York literary market during a stint on Staten Island tutoring Emerson’s nephew. He was twenty-seven, grieving, unpublished, and living in his parents’ house. Something had to change.

On 4 July 1845 — the date chosen with deliberate symbolism — Thoreau moved into a small house he had built on the northern shore of Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of Concord centre. He had cleared the land himself, bought a chicken coop for its boards, and erected the structure with some help from friends. The total cost was $28.12½ — an amount he compared to one year’s rent for his college room at Harvard, and which he itemised to the half-cent in what became one of the most famous pieces of cost accounting in literary history.

He had two purposes. The first was private: to write A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the tribute to John that worldly obligations had prevented him from completing for three years. The second was philosophical: to conduct an economic experiment. In 1837, aged twenty, he had written in his journal that “the order of things should be somewhat reversed — the seventh should be a man’s day of toil … and the other six his Sabbath.” At Walden, he set out to test whether a man could live by working six weeks of the year and devoting the remaining forty-six to higher pursuits — reversing the Yankee habit of working six days and resting one.

The answer was yes. By the end of his first year at the pond, Thoreau had built his house, established crop gardens with enough surplus to trade, completed the first draft of his book, and lived on approximately twenty-five dollars after expenses. He grew beans, corn, peas, potatoes, and turnips. He ate simply. He walked daily. He read voraciously. He observed the natural world with a scientist’s precision and a poet’s eye. And he proved, with ledger-book exactitude, that the necessities of life — food, shelter, clothing, fuel — cost almost nothing when stripped of the artificial wants that society imposes on its members.

The experiment was not hermitage. Thoreau walked to Concord regularly, dined at his mother’s table, received visitors constantly, and hosted the annual meeting of the Concord women’s anti-slavery society at his cabin. He sheltered fugitive slaves during the day and brought them to safe houses in Concord at night. The popular image of Thoreau as a misanthropic recluse communing with nature is a caricature; the man at Walden Pond was conducting a demonstration in applied economics, proving that the chains which bind men to the state are forged not in iron but in unnecessary desire.

Walden; or, Life in the Woods was published in 1854, seven years after he left the pond, after extensive revision. It condenses two years and two months into a single symbolic year running from summer to spring — from waking to rebirth. The first chapter, “Economy,” runs to nearly a hundred pages and constitutes one of the most radical critiques of wage labour, consumerism, and economic dependence ever written. It is, as one commentator observed, as revolutionary and anti-capitalistic as the Communist Manifesto, published the same year — but where Marx demands collective action to overthrow external systems, Thoreau demands individual action to overthrow internal ones. If you want a Marxist revolution, you must organise armies. If you want a Thoreauvian revolution, you need only change your own life.

The Night in Jail

In the summer of 1846, while living at Walden Pond, Thoreau encountered Sam Staples, the local tax collector and a longtime acquaintance, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau had not paid the tax since 1840. His refusal was directed at two things: the American government’s prosecution of the Mexican-American War — a war of territorial expansion designed to extend slave territory — and its continued complicity in the institution of slavery itself.

Staples, who liked Thoreau, offered to lend him the money or pay the tax himself. Thoreau refused. Staples later recalled: “I told him if he didn’t want to pay I would lock him up, and he was just as willing as not.” He was taken to the Middlesex County jail in Concord.

Standing in his cell that night, Thoreau studied the walls of solid stone two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, and the iron grating which strained the light. And he saw something extraordinary: “I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.” The stone walls and iron doors could contain his body, but they could not touch the thing that mattered. He recognised that “if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was.”

The jail had failed. It had intended to punish him and instead it had demonstrated its own irrelevance. The man inside the cell was freer than the men who had put him there, because his freedom was not contingent on the state’s permission.

The next morning, someone — likely his aunt, Maria Thoreau — paid the tax against his will. He was released. He had spent a single night behind bars. But that night had clarified something that would take him two years to articulate fully.

The Manifesto

In January and February 1848, Thoreau delivered lectures at the Concord Lyceum titled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government.” Bronson Alcott, who attended, recorded in his journal: “an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government.” The lectures were published in 1849 in Elizabeth Peabody’s Aesthetic Papers as “Resistance to Civil Government.” The essay was posthumously retitled “Civil Disobedience” — the name under which it changed the world.

It opens with one of the most famous declarations in political philosophy:

“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”

This is not rhetoric. It is a logical chain. If less government is better, then the logical terminus of “less” is “none.” Thoreau is not hedging; he is following a principle to its conclusion. The qualification — “when men are prepared for it” — is not a concession to the state’s necessity but a recognition that the real revolution is internal. The state will become unnecessary when men no longer need it, and men will no longer need it when they cease to believe they do.

From this opening, Thoreau systematically dismantles the legitimacy of the state. Government, he argues, “is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.” It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. “The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.” The Mexican War was “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.”

His central argument is that individual conscience is sovereign over legislative authority: “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?” When the state demands that the citizen become “an agent of injustice to another,” the citizen’s duty is clear: refuse. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

He anticipates — and dismisses — the pragmatic objection that one man’s resistance is futile. If one thousand men refused to pay their taxes, “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.” Tax resistance, Thoreau demonstrates, is not the disruption of peace — it is the refusal to fund war. Payment of the tax is the violent act, because it is payment that puts bullets in guns and shackles on wrists. Non-payment is the peaceful act. The inversion is complete: the state calls obedience “peace” and disobedience “violence,” but the truth is precisely the reverse.

The essay concludes with a vision that transcends mere reform:

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”

Even here, Thoreau remains consistent. He is not calling for a better state. He is articulating a principle — individual sovereignty — that, if genuinely accepted, would render the state unnecessary. What Thoreau was defending in 1849 was essentially the same concept Herbert Spencer would defend two years later in Social Statics as “the right to ignore the State.”

Counter-Friction

Thoreau understood, with an economist’s clarity, that material dependence is political dependence. In “Civil Disobedience,” he observes that “the rich man — not to make any invidious comparison — is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.” The more property a man accumulates, the more he is bound to the system that protects it, and the less freedom he has to resist.

This insight — that wealth is a chain, not a liberation — drove the Walden experiment. By reducing his needs to the essential, Thoreau freed himself from the leverage the state holds over the propertied. A man who needs nothing from the system owes nothing to the system. A man who owns nothing the system can confiscate has nothing to fear from the system. “If you really wish to do anything,” he advised a government officer who asked what he should do, “resign your office.” And to the citizen: simplify, so that you can afford to be free.

Walden is thus not merely a nature book. It is a manual of political liberation through voluntary simplicity — a worked example, with ledger entries, of how to make yourself ungovernable by making yourself self-sufficient. The connection between the Walden experiment and “Civil Disobedience” is direct and deliberate: Thoreau was arrested for non-payment of taxes while living at Walden Pond. He could afford to refuse because he had already reduced the cost of his freedom to $28.12½ per year. The man who needs nothing from the state can tell the state to go to hell.

This is why “Civil Disobedience” is not a utopian tract. It was written by a man who had already tested its premises against reality and found them sound. He was not imagining what freedom might look like. He was describing what it looked like — from the inside of a jail cell, from the shore of a pond, from a cabin he had built with his own hands for less than most men spent on a suit of clothes.

The Abolitionist

Thoreau was not merely a philosopher of resistance — he was a practitioner who put his body, his home, and his liberty at risk.

The Thoreau family were committed abolitionists. His mother, Cynthia, founded the Concord Abolitionist Committee and became the town’s most active stationmaster on the Underground Railroad. The Thoreau home on Main Street sheltered fugitive slaves throughout the 1840s and 1850s. Henry served as a conductor, escorting escaped slaves to the West Fitchburg railroad station — or to whichever station seemed safest under the circumstances — where they made connections for Canada. His cabin at Walden Pond also served as a hiding place; he sheltered fugitives during the day and moved them under cover of darkness.

On 1 October 1851, Thoreau recorded in his journal that he had “just put a fugitive slave, who has taken the name of Henry Williams, into the cars for Canada. He escaped from Stafford County, Virginia, to Boston last October.” The entry is remarkable for its matter-of-fact tone — as if helping a man flee bondage were simply one of the day’s ordinary tasks, which for Thoreau it was.

After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — which required Northern citizens to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves — Thoreau’s fury intensified. On 4 July 1854, with Walden in final page proofs, he mounted a platform at Harmony Grove in Framingham alongside William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and other prominent abolitionists. Garrison set fire to copies of the Fugitive Slave Act and the United States Constitution. Thoreau delivered “Slavery in Massachusetts,” a speech far more incendiary than “Civil Disobedience,” in which he indicted the entire Commonwealth for its complicity in human bondage. In his journal, he wrote words that capture the total incompatibility between a thinking man and the slave state: “My thoughts are murder to the State; I endeavour in vain to observe nature; my thoughts involuntarily go plotting against the State.”

When the radical abolitionist John Brown visited Concord in 1857, he lunched at Mrs. Thoreau’s and spoke publicly later that day. He returned in 1859. After Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and his arrest for attempting to incite a slave rebellion, Thoreau delivered “A Plea for Captain John Brown” in Concord, Boston, and Worcester — one of the first public defences of Brown’s actions at a time when even many abolitionists condemned the raid. In that speech, Thoreau declared: “I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.”

This was a significant evolution. “Civil Disobedience” had advocated passive withdrawal — refuse, do not resist. “A Plea for Captain John Brown” acknowledged that there are circumstances in which passive resistance is insufficient, in which the machinery of injustice is so monstrous that active resistance becomes a moral obligation. Thoreau did not abandon his principles; he followed them to their conclusion. If the state holds men in chains, and if peaceful resistance has failed to break those chains, then the man of conscience must decide whether his commitment to non-violence outweighs his commitment to human freedom. Thoreau made his choice.

On 2 December 1859, John Brown was hanged. The next day, Thoreau became an accomplice to the escape of Francis Jackson Merriam, one of Brown’s raiders and one of the most wanted men in the country. He personally drove Merriam by wagon from Concord to the train station in Acton, knowing only his alias — “Lockwood” — but knowing full well what he was doing and the risk he was taking. Merriam escaped to Canada.

One World at a Time

Thoreau had been in declining health for years. Tuberculosis — the disease that had already killed his sister Helen and his grandfather — was slowly consuming his lungs. In the winter of 1860–1861, he caught a severe cold while counting tree rings in a snowstorm, and he never recovered. He spent his final months revising his manuscripts with meticulous care, preparing his unpublished essays for posterity, and receiving visitors with a composure that astonished everyone who saw him.

Sam Staples — the same constable who had jailed him in 1846 — visited and later said he had “never seen a man dying with so much pleasure and peace.”

When his Aunt Louisa asked whether he had made his peace with God, Thoreau replied: “I did not know we had ever quarrelled, Aunt.”

A few days before his death, the abolitionist minister Parker Pillsbury — an old family friend who had left his own church over the slavery issue — sat beside him and said: “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” Thoreau’s answer was three centuries of philosophy compressed into six words: “One world at a time.”

On the morning of 6 May 1862, his sister Sophia read him a passage from the “Thursday” section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers — the book he had written at Walden Pond as an elegy for John. He looked forward to the homeward passage in the “Friday” section and said: “Now comes good sailing.” In his final utterance, only two words could be understood: “moose” and “Indian.” He died at nine o’clock that morning. He was forty-four years old.

Outdoors, where he could no longer see them, the earliest apple trees began to leaf and show green.

The Afterlife of an Idea

Thoreau’s political writings had little influence during his lifetime. His contemporaries dismissed or ignored his political essays, seeing him as an eccentric naturalist rather than a serious theorist. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers sold fewer than three hundred of the one thousand copies he printed at his own expense. Walden was a modest success. “Civil Disobedience” attracted almost no attention.

But the power of his ideas grew steadily after his death, in ways that would have astonished and perhaps amused him.

Leo Tolstoy discovered “Civil Disobedience” in the late nineteenth century, and it profoundly shaped his Christian anarchism. Tolstoy in turn influenced Mohandas Gandhi, who adopted Thoreau’s principles of non-cooperation in the struggle for Indian independence. Gandhi later wrote that the essay’s “incisive logic is unanswerable.” Martin Luther King Jr. encountered “Civil Disobedience” as a student at Morehouse College in 1944 and wrote in his autobiography: “Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I 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.”

The libertarian tradition claimed him with equal force. Charles T. Sprading included Thoreau in his landmark 1913 anthology Liberty and the Great Libertarians. Murray Rothbard, in his 1968 essay “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal,” recalled: “One of our great intellectual heroes was Henry David Thoreau, and his essay, ‘Civil Disobedience,’ was one of our guiding stars. Right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an appreciation of Thoreau.” Emma Goldman and the philosophical anarchist tradition drew deeply from his work. As the Imaginative Conservative has observed, Thoreau “has at least as much in common with Albert Jay Nock or Robert Nozick as he has with Martin Luther King Jr.”

This is the paradox of Thoreau’s influence: he has been claimed by movements as different as Gandhian non-violence, anarcho-capitalism, and the American civil rights movement. But the paradox dissolves when you see what all three share — the conviction that the individual conscience is the ultimate political authority, that no law can override it, and that a man who acts on this conviction, even alone, even at personal cost, possesses a power that no state can match.

Thoreau would have understood this perfectly. He never asked anyone to follow him. He asked only that each person follow their own conscience — and that they simplify their lives enough to afford the cost of doing so.

Key Works

  • Civil Disobedience (1849) — Originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government.” The foundational text of individual resistance to state injustice, and one of the most influential political essays ever written.
  • Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) — A reflection on simple living, self-reliance, and the liberation that comes from reducing dependence on institutions. Contains the hundred-page chapter “Economy,” one of the most radical critiques of wage labour and consumerism ever composed.
  • A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) — A travel narrative and philosophical meditation written as an elegy for his brother John, who died in 1842.
  • Slavery in Massachusetts (1854) — A scorching indictment of Northern complicity in the Fugitive Slave Act, delivered alongside William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth.
  • A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) — A defence of radical abolitionist action, marking Thoreau’s evolution from passive resistance to the acknowledgment that active resistance against tyranny may become a moral obligation.
  • Walking (1862) — Published posthumously. A meditation on wildness, freedom, and the spiritual necessity of nature.
  • Life Without Principle (1863) — Published posthumously. An essay on the dangers of materialism and the importance of living deliberately.

Notable Quotations

“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’… Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — ‘That government is best which governs not at all.'”
— Civil Disobedience (1849)

“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.”
— Civil Disobedience (1849)

“All men recognise the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”
— Civil Disobedience (1849)

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
— Civil Disobedience (1849)

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
— Civil Disobedience (1849)

“A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.”
— Civil Disobedience (1849)

“The rich man — not to make any invidious comparison — is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.”
— Civil Disobedience (1849)

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”
— Walden (1854)

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
— Walden (1854)

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
— Walden (1854)

“Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify.”
— Walden (1854)

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
— Walden (1854)

“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”
— Walden (1854)

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
— Walden (1854)

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
— Journal (1850)

“The law will never make men free; it is men who have to make the law free.”
— Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)

“My thoughts are murder to the State; I endeavour in vain to observe nature; my thoughts involuntarily go plotting against the State.”
— Journal (1854)

“I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.”
— A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

“All good things are wild and free.”
— Walking (1862)

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
— Walking (1862)

“One world at a time.”
— Deathbed reply to Parker Pillsbury (1862)

Influenced

  • Leo Tolstoy (Christian anarchism and nonviolent resistance)
  • Mohandas Gandhi (satyagraha and Indian independence movement)
  • Martin Luther King Jr. (American civil rights movement)
  • Emma Goldman (philosophical anarchism)
  • Frank Chodorov (American Old Right libertarianism)
  • Murray Rothbard (anarcho-capitalism and the modern libertarian movement)
  • The environmental movement (through Walden and his nature writing)

Further Reading