(1817 - 1862)
At the age of twenty-seven in 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond on a plot of land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau was imprisoned the following year for not paying his poll taxes, an experience that helped to inspire his essay “Civil Disobedience,” in which he remarked, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” He had spent one night in jail.
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1850All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849What a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1855Who hears the fishes when they cry?
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849All men recognize 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.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849
