Abijohn’s Daily Quote
“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, shall we endeavor to amend them and obey them until we succeed, or shall we transgress them at once?”
—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
“The rich man… is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau—best known for Walden and his essay Civil Disobedience—remains one of America’s most potent voices for moral resistance. In Walden, Thoreau recounts his retreat to a self-built cabin in the woods in search of a simpler life. But it was his arrest—after refusing to pay poll taxes used to disenfranchise Black voters—that led to Civil Disobedience, a timeless essay on the individual’s duty to oppose injustice.
Thoreau spent only one night in jail before his aunt bailed him out (against his wishes), but the experience lit a fire. He challenged readers to consider: Should we obey unjust laws until the majority changes them, or disobey them as a form of protest? He believed the latter. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. credited Thoreau as a major influence in shaping the philosophy of nonviolent resistance.
Author John Updike once remarked that Walden had become “a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset,” and warned it risks becoming as “revered and unread as the Bible.” And yet its message endures. Thoreau’s warning about the rich being tied to the systems that enrich them remains painfully relevant today.
The uncomfortable truth is this: those who benefit from unjust systems are often the loudest critics of those demanding change. Slaveholders, polluters, child-labor industrialists, and misogynists have all used their power to stall progress. That’s why civil disobedience has always been necessary—to speed up justice when the “majority” drags its feet.
This isn’t just history. Today, the right to protest is under threat. An administration punishes dissenters—labeling them traitors, locking them up, or cutting their funding—echoing the tactics of tyrants, not democrats. And with rising pressure to erase uncomfortable truths from classrooms, voices like Thoreau’s may soon be silenced.
Should that happen, we won’t just lose a literary figure—we’ll lose a fundamental piece of the American identity: the right to question authority. To defy unjust power. To think for ourselves.
Fun fact: America’s first recorded student protest happened in 1766 at Harvard—the “Great Butter Rebellion,” where students protested rancid butter. Half the student body was suspended. The ringleader? Asa Dunbar—Thoreau’s grandfather. Seems resistance runs in the family.
