Some Thoughts on Thoreau

 

I’ve been reading Henry David Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” first published in 1849 and now more commonly known as “Civil Disobedience.” I want to share some of my favorite passages.

 

The language is a bit pompous and wordy and Thoreau doesn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of women, but let’s get over that and think about the real substance of what he’s saying here. Mahatma Gandhi did, and Martin Luther King Jr. after him. Consider:

 

“The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. … Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil … as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.”

 

“[When] a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”

 

“Action from principle – the perception and the performance of right – changes things and relations. … It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”

 

“Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?”

 

“Why does [the government] always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?”