Author of Civil Disobedience, source of nonviolent resistance
An American writer and thinker. Jailed for a night for refusing to pay a poll tax that supported slavery and an aggressive war, he wrote from it the far-reaching Civil Disobedience. He argued that when the law demands you do something unjust, a person of conscience has the right — even the duty — to refuse to obey, even at the cost of prison. This idea of "protesting a bad law by peaceful lawbreaking" became the direct source of Gandhi’s nonviolent non-cooperation and Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement — a hermit living alone by Walden Pond supplied the theory for the greatest struggles of the twentieth century.
Thoreau refused to pay a tax to a slaveholding government and was jailed. His friend Emerson, the story goes, came to visit and asked, "Why are you in there?" Thoreau shot back, "Why are you not?" — under an unjust government, the place for an upright person is prison. That night in jail and that retort crystallized into Civil Disobedience, which later armed Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
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