The essay Civil Disobedience, written by Henry David Thoreau has much to do with Thoreau’s own experiences than a general perception of people as a whole. Thoreau, a stellar student from Harvard believed one key idea: change begins with the individual. With this belief Thoreau in 1846 spoke out against the Mexican American War and slavery. His response resulted in the deliberate obliviousness to his taxes. In July of 1846 Thoreau was arrested for not paying his taxes and spent a night in Jail. During this time Thoreau wrote about the laws enforced by the government must be based on conscience rather than majority appeal.…
Civil Disobedience is the refusal to comply with certain laws or to pay taxes and fines, as a peaceful form of political protest. The action of Civil Disobedience is usually, not always though, classified as being not violent resistance. Also, it may be compared as compassion of respectable disagreement.…
“Civil Disobedience” by Henry Thoreau warns its readers that we are at the mercy of our government and have no power as a minority that conforms to the majority, which represses our desire to resist the wrongs we believe in without the support of the masses. The place for an honorable, just man is within prison, which he explains through his personal experience. In part 1, Thoreau exposes how the government is without a conscience, susceptible to corruption for their own advantage, and are served not by men but by “machines” (5). We are left “to the mercy of chance” under the power of the majority. Part 2 explains that Thoreau didn’t believe in the voting system so would not pay poll tax, and was sent to jail only to find that he felt more…
Thoreau states in the text that this exact lack of scrupulous intentions would affect the decision-making and state of mind of any individual citizen. "If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law." "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support." (On Duty of Civil Disobedience.) Thoreau explains that every citizen has the obligation to oppose all unjust occurrences and has his or her own individual responsibility within their own…
“If the law requires you to be the agent of injustice, then, I say, break the law” (Henry Thoreau) This famous quote is taken from the famous essay Civil Disobedience written in 1848, Civil Disobedience still stands as an expression of moral and individual conscience against a un just government. To begin, the quote written by Henry Thoreau, “If the law requires you to be the agent of injustice, then, I say, break the law” is essentially saying If following the law results in a wrong done to another person, then do not follow the law, and that morals from human to human come before government rules or laws resulting in disobedience.…
In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau believes that the government is being unjust. He believes that the government is being used by a “few individuals using the standing government as their tool” (Thoreau, 940). If the government is “the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will” then the government shouldn’t carry out unjust policies such as the Mexican War and slavery despite the governments knowledge that there are those who opposes…
I think that Thoreau makes some good points about civil disobedience in his writing. And I think that if more countries would go by these points, then a lot of the world’s most major and disturbing problems would be solved. Here are his main points:…
In The Case Against Civil Disobedience the unknown author claims in his very first sentence that “the most striking characteristic of civil disobedience is its irrelevance to the problems of today” and that it is “the resort… exercised because the subject cannot or will not take up the rights and duties of the citizen.” What he fails to realize is that the rights and duties of a citizen is to keep an eye on the laws that rule the land and to revolt when those laws become unjust. It’s all part and parcel to the social contract thought up by Locke and heavily leaned upon by Thomas Jefferson. As Henry David Thoreau says in Civil Disobedience, “a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscious.” Civil disobedience can never become irrelevant because corruption will forever attempt to corrode even the best intentions of a government and so there will always be a need to revolt when unjust laws get pasted.…
Without civil disobedience it’s impossible to see where we would be today. The first act of civil disobedience was the Boston Tea Party. On December, 16, 1773 the group Sons of Liberty created a political demonstration against the Tea Act. The Tea Act was an unfair tax used to make us pay for their war. This is one of many times we were treated differently and unfairly than citizens living in Britain. The act of throwing tea into the harbor ignited tension for more people to protest and overthrow the…
Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” inspired a revolution of men to do what is right. His term: civil disobedience, refers to people protesting unjust laws by refusing to comply with them. This process is not just for any laws and practices but ones that cannot be resolved by the Democratic process. In his time, Thoreau referred to slavery and the Mexican-American War. Thoreau found both of these pieces of history to be hypocritical of the United States moral values. The United States stands for the home of the free when, in fact, they enslaved people. He refused to be a part of the government and He showed his civil disobedience by not paying taxes. He was put in jail for this, saying: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,…
Martin Luther King, Jr’s message in “A Letter From Birmingham Jail” and Henry David Thoreau’s in “Civil Disobedience” are similar with minor differences. Both men agree it is a citizen’s duty to disobey an unjust law. King and Thoreau equally manifested their ability to protest by taking a peaceful approach, also accepting the repercussions that followed. King and Thoreau are prime examples on whether one is bound to always obey the law is increasingly important during periods of grossly immoral legislation and unjust institutions. King and Thoreau believe it is a citizen’s duty to navigate through legislature with their moral compass, however Thoreau does not believe…
To begin with, in order to achieve true freedom one must peacefully protest. In the passage “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argues that it is acceptable to break a law if it an unjust law. According to the text “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in lines 242-246, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., says, “ I submit that any individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him it is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the…
Martin Luther king Jr. once said, “They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and non-violently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience sake.” Men follow their conscious until their perspective of conscience being is distorted. They often see the moral light but are side-tracked by the world at large. Ultimately, every man is a product of their surroundings; thus, they tend to assimilate to what they know. The conscience innovation is throbbing with potential, impetuous, once asserted; it can reconstruct the foundation of all statutes. In Thoreau’s, “Civil Disobedience”, and King’s, “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” there are direct references to the methods and reasons for civil disobedience; however, the backgrounds of these letters, although distant, converge from different settings.…
The purpose of both Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is to talk about the injustice law in the society. Thoreau explains how the government is run by the majority “because they are physically the strongest” (941). Thoreau believes a society “in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice” (941). Thoreau suggests to the audience that it is necessary to “resist” the injustice “for the most part” (942). Similarly, King states that “one has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” and that “conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” (265). Through non-violence protest, both Thoreau and King are encouraging their audience to take the duty of civil…
The issues evident in our society must be attacked with lawful action, and this will do nothing but have a positive impact on our society because they will be the first step towards mending the divide of our society. However just as King states in his marches that the consequences for action must be faced without unlawful retaliation so to does Thoreau argue that it is the responsibility of a free society to break unjust laws through civil disobedience. Civil Disobedience has only ever had a positive impact on our society and the global one. When women disobeyed social tendencies and gained rights immediate benefits were seen in the medical and technological fields. When African Americans were given freedom and equality new and improved living conditions were quickly found.…