Civil Disobedience

By Henry David Thoreau

1849
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.
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all
governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought
against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may
also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm
of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the
people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted
before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, 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.
This American government- what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring
to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It
has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his
will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary
for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its
din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how
successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own
advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself
furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. 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. For
government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another
alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone
by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage
to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and,
if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by
their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous
persons who put obstructions on the railroads.
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves nogovernment men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.
Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and
that will be one step toward obtaining it.
After all, 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?- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of
expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree,
resign his conscience to the legislation? 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. It is truly enough said that a corporation
has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a
conscience. 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. A common and natural
result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain,
corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and
dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences,
which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are
all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and
magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy-Yard, and
behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can
make a man with its black arts- a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man
laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral
accompaniments, though it may be,
"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried."

Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1841
\Ne te quaesiveris extra."
\Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is
of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own
thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true
for all men, | that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall
be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, |
and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last
Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we
ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and
traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which ashes across his mind
from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet
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he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of
genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson
for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the
other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense
precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced
to take with shame our own opinion from another.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself
for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full
of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power
which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is
which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one
face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another
none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that
particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine
idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate
and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his
work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has
put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done
otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver.
In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place
the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided
themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception
that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through
their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must
accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors
and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution,
but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and
advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour
of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind,
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that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength
and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole,
their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are
disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one
babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to
it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own
piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not
to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force,
because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice
is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors
very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as
much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude
of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse;
independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and
facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift,
summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.
He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an
independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you.
But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as
he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched
by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again
into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed,
observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted
innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing
a_airs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts

into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and
inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy
against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock
company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread
to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The
virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not
realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
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explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your
own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the
world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to
make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear
old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the
sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,
| \But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied,
\They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live
then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the
only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against
it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every
thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily
we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than
is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all
ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?
If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to
me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, `Go
love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have
that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this
incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles o_. Thy love afar is
spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is
handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge
to it, | else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the
counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun
father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would
write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better
than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me
not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not
tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in
good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist,
that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not
belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to
whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to
prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at
college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many
now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; | though I
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confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked
dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule.
There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as
some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a _ne in expiation
of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or
extenuation of their living in the world, | as invalids and the insane pay a
high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live.
My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of
a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering
and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal
from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no di_erence
whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot
consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as
my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or
the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This
rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole
distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you
will always _nd those who think they know what is your duty better than
you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy
in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst
of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
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