Preview

Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
218 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau civil disobedience explains the vital reason why there is need to prioritize one's conscience over any requirements of the law. Therefore, he provides a strong view on the need to be quite sure of actions that are undertaken by individuals as opposed to the assumptions that are based on the law. Henry's sentiments, therefore, provides significant criticisms on the American social institutions and policies that were mainly seeking to promote slavery at the time while completely knowing that their actions were not good.
He urges that the federal government on rare occasions do they prove to be useful and that its power is derived from the majority because

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Henry David Thoreau takes the motto "A government that governs least governs best" (1) to heart in his essay "Civil Disobedience". Throughout his controversial masterpiece, Thoreau criticizes the government for having too much power and interfering with the American population, but he also blames the governed for mindlessly obeying any law that is passed. Thoreau uses countless literary devices in order to make the touchy opinions presented in "Civil Disobedience" easier to understand and more convincing. Through use of innumerable similes and metaphors, Thoreau makes his arguments and ideas easier to understand, and effectively convinces anyone who reads his essay that the government is "each instant losing some of its integrity" (1), and that it should be done away with immediately.…

    • 396 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Prompt: Does your book contain one or more of the following themes? What techniques does the author use to develop this theme?…

    • 556 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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.…

    • 647 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In "Civil Disobediance", by Thoreau, Thoreau claims that there should be improvement from the government, and that people should fight for it. Thoreau uses paradox, and similes to convince his readers that they should take the initiative to speak up.…

    • 237 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life In The Woods…

    • 956 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. both shared a similar theme in their writing, which was their passion for equality. These two authors both desperately longed for fairness amongst the people of our nation. Though the stories of Thoreau and King were similar, how they went about it differed.…

    • 451 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Henry David Thoreau was an activist writer. His essays were philosophical and meant to empower people. His idea of protest against the government and slavery was passive and rational. to do nothing. He thought if everyone refused to participate, the government would have to come to their senses and realize they are wrong.…

    • 1150 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    “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…

    • 204 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In today’s society, it is often unclear where to draw the line between good morals and effective government. It is for this reason that many times, laws that are enacted for the “good of the people” can be in direct conflict with a person’s conscience. Due to the various struggles that the United States has faced in building a government, this topic has been a popular discussion throughout American literature. Although they did not live during the same time, American writers Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr. each wrote about how a person should not follow laws that they believe to be immoral. Thoreau’s main concern pertained to the legal existence of slaves and slave-owners, and a century later, King spoke out against legal segregation in the South. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. shares the same attitude with Henry David Thoreau’s work, “Civil Disobedience” concerning just and unjust laws; however, they each had different means of executing their beliefs.…

    • 919 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    “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.…

    • 410 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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:…

    • 272 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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.…

    • 596 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Ralph Beachum

    • 3085 Words
    • 13 Pages

    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.…

    • 3085 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sioux Tribe Research Paper

    • 1664 Words
    • 7 Pages

    He follows this up by explaining that “If it is of such nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law.” This also clarifies that when the nature of the law is unjust, then following good conscience resulting in the breaking of the law is actually the duty of the people. According to Thoreau, for a law “to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed.” Strangely enough, Thoreau believes that a citizen’s duty is not to force others to eradicate the wrong by breaking the law, but only eradicate the wrong in one’s own life. Thoreau shows how remove injustice from one’s life in an influential line that reads as…

    • 1664 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In order to understand Thoreau’s claim, we must first understand what civil disobedience is. Many people assume that the “civil” part of civil disobedience means that the disobedience is “courteous and polite.” This assumption isn’t necessarily true, however, because, in this case, “civil” retains its original meaning: “of or relating to the state.” (The “civil” in civil rights means the same thing.) Therefore, civil disobedience literally means “the act of…

    • 485 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays